Fall is for Funerals and Vonnegut
by enserio
Summary: A realistic glimpse of how assistant NYTimes editor Rory finds ways back to Stars Hollow and back to casual encounters with a former boyfriend through his annotated pages of Hemingway, Kerouac, Woolf, and Vonnegut. Written as the post-series reboot, 4 seasons, 4 very long chapters, with healthy doses of coffee, whiskey, literature, and hidden half-smiles. Literati, Revival.
1. Fall is for Funerals and Vonnegut

**Fall is for Funerals and Vonnegut**

She wrapped her numb fingers around the hot paper cup of coffee, feeling the burn and only half minding. The coffee cart at the funeral parlor in New Haven would get the job done well enough today. She didn't even feel like she could taste coffee, to be honest, but she wanted the heat, and something to calm her wringing hands.

It was a wet, chilly day. The autumn leaves stuck to the soggy pavement, drifting in the cold wind. The sky was gray and expansive, pressing the color out of the fall foliage, dripping down the back of her collar and making her hands clammy and cold. Movie-perfect day for a funeral. Hollywood glamour, and Emily Gilmore, would approve.

She was wearing work clothes, because she got the notice so late and just flung herself on a train to get to Hartford. But she was too late. Her grandfather died while she was passing through the ghostly Connecticut night, the trees already turning to skeletons that rattled as the train passed by. So, separated from her wardrobe in her New York City apartment, she was stuck with her black pencil skirt and a borrowed black blouse of her mom's. She tied her hair in a knot, so she probably looked perfectly presentable, but she felt like she had been wearing the same pair of tights for three days and that even though she wasn't wearing any mascara, if she cried, her face would probably run anyways.

"Hey, kiddo, service is starting soon."

She started at the sound of her mom's voice, but then quickly turned and handed her mom the second cup of coffee. "Okay, ready."

"Luke will meet us in there," Lorelai exhaled, rubbing her temple. "Better go sit with mom."

"Yeah," Rory agreed. Her mom's eyes were very red, and though she was clearly trying to stay upright and functional, for the sake of Rory's grandmother, Rory could tell she was hurting.

They walked into the echoing, expansive church, following the stream of crisp black outfits that piled into the pews. Lorelai pulled her up to the front row where Emily was sitting ramrod stiff and expressionless.

"Hey, Grandma," Rory sat next to her.

"Hello, Rory," Emily gave her granddaughter a brief smile, then returned to looking straight ahead. "I'm glad at least they got the flowers right. Richard would have been furious if they hadn't have listened to me today. But the flowers are exactly perfect."

Lorelai had a witty comment, but choked on it. Rory reached beside her and held her hand tightly.

Emily, after absorbing the silent pause, shook, ever so slightly, hardly betraying emotion. Rory reached for her hand too.

The three Gilmore women sat, linked together, as the pews filled and as the solemn music filtered through the cavernous arches. Rory worked in the world of words as an assistant editor for the international news section of the New York Times, but she had no words for this moment. She felt the sorrow, and the grief, and the magnified pain of the two women on either side of her.

She clasped their hands and looked upward, at the stained glass that illuminated the space. Her grandfather's casket seemed small beneath it.

She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see Luke, uncomfortable but handsome in a black suit. He had his other hand on Lorelai's shoulder, his thumb rubbing back and forth. Her mom's eyes were closed, eyebrows pinched.

"You doing okay?" he asked, half whispering, half gruff.

Rory nodded. "We found the coffee."

Her mom's lips twitched.

Luke gave her a bracing squeeze on the shoulder, and then returned his attention to Lorelai. Rory could sense the comfort that it brought her mom to have Luke there, all of his warmth and logic scraping some kind of clarity into the blustery wet Autumn day. Instinctively, she gave her grandmother's hand a squeeze. Emily's source of warmth and logic was gone.

* * *

The service was dignified and proper, perfectly lovely really, but Rory was relieved when the last note of music faded and the church filled with the echoes of a hundred people rising to their feet. Her grandmother quickly disappeared to play the role of hostess, graciously accepting murmured condolences and shared memories. Luke went to get Lorelai more coffee. Rory stood, tiptoeing slightly in her tall black heels, overlooking the crowd. She knew almost everyone in the room from her DAR days, but couldn't find a word to say to a single one of them.

When she knew her mom was safely back with Luke, she disappeared through a side exit and returned to the wet afternoon, feeling the cold drizzle drip against her coat. A few drops hit her face, but she remembered she wasn't wearing make up and let it happen. It was quiet in the little stone courtyard, rain tapping against the stones.

No words, still. She felt exhausted, aching, and empty. The list of things to do at her grandmother's house was a mile long. She was tired from playing the emotional support for the last few days. The coroner, the hospital, the church, the reception. Her cell phone had rung incessantly with vendors and relatives, well-wishers and funeral arrangers.

She rocked forward, pressing the sodden leaves into the pavement with the toes of her shoes. The dreary wind moved through the rattling branches above her. She sighed.

* * *

When the formal reception at the country club was over, and when Lorelai and Rory had finally put Emily to bed after a gin and tonic and repeated promises to come over in the morning, they finally drove back to Stars Hollow. Luke had already gone back, excusing himself from the intimate sadness at Emily's house. Rory didn't blame him. She wouldn't want to be around to put a grieving widow to bed either.

"God, Dad would have loved that," Lorelai groaned, stretching her arms against the steering wheel, "So many cigars. And insurance people! And brandy."

"Just his cup of tea," Rory agreed, "Grandma did great."

"She always does great."

"Weirdly composed."

"Until the day she puts on sweatpants and moves in to our spare bedroom."

Rory nearly smiled. "You won't let her move in."

"Oh but she will," Lorelai snorted, "blessed duty of being the only child. Accept your parents into your home when they choose to formally quit caring about things like eating regular meals or getting dressed in the morning or not using the sofa as a toilet."

"Grandma is a ways away from that," Rory disagreed. "Years."

"Oh but it'll come," Lorelai tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, "it'll come."

It was a mark of their exhaustion that the conversation did not go much further than that, besides a few quips about the ugly hats that the DAR women wore to the funeral and snarky comments about the reverend's occasional irreverent remarks. Rory felt herself melting into the seat, her body exhausted from the work of the week.

"When are you leaving?" Lorelai asked, as they neared Stars Hollow.

"I took the week off, so probably Saturday morning," Rory yawned, "I want to be able to have final say on some of the Sunday edition."

Lorelai smiled, "I'm glad you're staying for a couple more days."

"I want to be here," Rory said simply.

They pulled into town, and Rory saw that Luke's was all lit up, the door open and people milling about outside.

"What's going on?" she asked, concerned. "Was there an accident?"

"I don't know," Lorelai quickly parked, peering at the diner, "I doubt it. He would have called."

The two women got out and slammed the doors of the Jeep shut behind them. As they got closer to the diner Rory saw just about everyone in town crammed onto different chairs and benches, talking and laughing.

"It's for us," Rory realized.

"Yeah," Lorelai breathed.

Most of the people inside were wearing black. Rory saw Kirk in a black kilt, and Miss Patty without her usual array of colorful scarves. Luke was still in his suit pants but had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, clearly working on the catering aspect of the whole affair. She saw him yell something at Cesar, gesturing at a plate on the counter.

Lorelai, always more outgoing than Rory, gathered her energy, tossed her hair back, and walked in. She let the town surround her, clasping Babette's hand, and awkwardly hugging Kirk. Rory trailed her, but dodged the crowd and headed straight for Luke.

"Wow, Luke, did you do this?"

"I had some help," Luke shrugged off the credit, "but yeah. I figured you all needed some detoxification from the Hartford social scene. And everyone, and I mean _everyone_ , wanted to see you both and make sure everything was fine."

Rory turned, leaning against the counter and watching as the town engulfed her mom. Even Taylor was touching Lorelai's shoulder, an affected expression of grief on his solemn face. He was shaking his head slowly, responding to the flow of conversation, but Rory thought he looked a bit like an overdone actor.

"Do you want some food?" Luke asked.

She turned back towards him, and then took in the sheer amount of food that was lined up on the counter, potluck style. She recognized over half of it as Sookie's delicate gourmet fare, with just about the entirety of Luke's menu thrown in. It was weirdly comforting to see the cheeseburgers side by side with the artichoke canapés, Sookie's beautiful crème brulee cozied up to Luke's uneven doughnuts. A whole tray of bacon seemed to be there specifically for her and her mom.

"Wow Luke," she nodded in appreciation at the counter, "You guys outdid yourselves."

"I told Sookie I didn't need her to help," Luke frowned, "but you know how she is. Just has to cook everything she's not asked to."

"Well, me and mom appreciate it," Rory grabbed a paper plate, handing it to Luke, "a little bit of everything? I'll bring it to her."

He took it, "Coming right up."

Rory leaned against the counter, doing her best to fade into the background. The noise buzzed around her, and she felt warm in the bright, overcrowded diner. She appreciated their presence, but she didn't have it in her to talk to anyone just then. When Sookie caught her eye from across the room Rory gave her a small smile and a wave, and Sookie seemed to understand. She gave her a warm smile but stayed where she was, close to Lorelai, joining in on reminiscing about all the catering jobs she did for the Gilmores.

"I'll bring it to her," Luke reappeared, holding three paper plates overflowing with food instead of just the one, "uh, do you want to sit behind the counter? Quieter back here."

She felt a warm rush of affection. "Yes please."

Luke dragged a stool back behind the counter, up against the wall, just far enough removed from the crowd to discourage conversation. Rory perched on it gratefully and watched as he moved through the crowd towards her mother. Lorelai flashed him a bright smile – the first Rory had seen her make in days – and kissed him on the cheek. He stayed right by her side, fending off Kirk for her, an arm around her shoulders.

For a brief moment, she wondered if he had shuttered the diner for the last few days. He had been right there with them in her grandparents' house, running errands, calling florists, writing surly thank you notes for the dozens of flowers that showed up at the door. Maybe this was why the whole town had showed up. They wanted to support Lorelai and Rory, sure, but also Luke's had probably been closed, so had they seen each other at all the last few days? Where did everyone congregate and gossip and air their grievances if Luke's was closed?

Luke came back to the counter for a brief moment to grab the pot of coffee. Without asking he filled up a mug and handed it to Rory as he passed, grabbing an extra mug for Lorelai.

"Oh hey, Luke," Rory stopped him for a second, "did you close the place over the last few days?"

"Nah," Luke jerked his head back toward the kitchen, "I had some help."

"Cesar and Lane?" Rory smiled, "that's great."

He shrugged, and then kept moving.

She cradled her coffee, crossing her legs on the stool. She felt stiff and tired in her funeral work clothes, excited to go home and change into flannel pajamas and sink into bed, or on the couch with a series of bad movies. She still didn't have words. She needed someone else, an author or a screenwriter, to find the words for her.

The bell clanged and the door opened. A familiar head of messy dark hair and pair of hunched shoulders sidled into the crowded space, arms laden with grocery bags. She watched, her breath catching, as he circled the opposite side of the counter and disappeared in the back, eyes down, not making eye contact with anyone.

Of course Luke's had stayed open, if Jess came back to help out.

She felt slightly self-conscious, re-crossing her legs and grasping her mug and watching intently as Babette and Miss Patty teased Kirk over his kilt.

She had seen Jess irregularly a handful of times over the years, primarily in accidental encounters whenever he was in Stars Hollow visiting Luke and she happened to be in town to see Lorelai. They talked briefly, always perfectly cordial, friendly, and interested in career updates and superficial news. But she always backed away rather quickly, uncomfortable and guilty with how she had ended things the last time she had seen him in Truncheon. He usually had more confidence, matching her gaze rather expressionlessly, unafraid to say hello or ask pointedly blunt questions. " _You working at CNN yet? What's with the pantsuit? Published a novel yet?_ "

If she thought about it, Rory hadn't seen him in probably over a year or two. Somehow they had unintentionally slipped into a pattern of coming home for different holidays. Rory knew he came back for Thanksgiving, with Luke, but she always went to Hartford to see her grandparents. She had also heard Luke let slip that he spent Christmas back in California, with his stepmom and stepsister. Those words always felt strange, grasping to her. She couldn't imagine Jess with a little stepsister, reading books or teasing her or buying her ice cream and Christmas presents. But then again she didn't know him anymore. They hadn't spoken properly in years.

He was a successful author, she knew that. His name appeared every couple years on her own paper's best seller list. She owned all of his books, stacked neatly in a corner of one of her bookshelves, but she hadn't been able to read any of them since _Subsect_. It always felt too invasive, as invasive as when she read the little notes he used to scribble in the margins of her books, scraps of thought that bared his inner self.

"Rory," Lorelai waved to her, "Rory come here."

She sighed, but stood, straightened her skirt, and then wove her way through the crowd towards her mom.

"Rory, Rory, do you remember when Dad was here in Stars Hollow and spent the day with us, and drove us crazy, and yelled at Dean for making you that car?" Lorelai tugged at her sleeve, "do you remember?"

Rory half smiled, "Yeah I do."

"He was always so worried about Rory," Lorelai turned back to the group, holding court with her mug of coffee, "he loved that girl so much."

Miss Patty said something, to great peals of laughter, but Rory wasn't paying attention. She scanned the diner, catching sight of Mrs. Kim, offering up her own vegan potato salad to anyone who wanted it, and Michel, arguing with somebody. The noise swelled around her. Her feet hurt in her heels, and she could feel her hair starting to become undone, tendrils escaping around her face.

Jess came back from the kitchen and stood near the register, fingers interlaced on the counter, watching the crowd in the same way that she was.

She was surprised, if she was honest with herself, at how young he still looked. He was still wearing a button up and black jeans, but he had a fitted blazer over the familiar ensemble, dressing it up to what she knew would be considered cool in the literary world. His hair was still messy, complimented by a shade of five o'clock shadow that made his jaw line sharper than usual. If he seemed older, it was in his confidence. He leaned against the counter without the usual defensive posture, without dark eyes that flashed anger. He seemed perfectly content to be there, watching Luke, calm and collected.

After a moment, he glanced at her. She returned the gaze, too tired to care if it was strange that she was observing him like that.

If he was surprised at seeing her, or affected at all, he didn't show it. Instead, his dark eyes serious, he raised an eyebrow and gave her the slightest of nods.

 _You okay?_

She tipped her shoulders a few centimeters. Okay enough.

Jess maintained the gaze for a brief second, taking in her sloppy hair and work attire, and then returned to working, picking up empty plates and tossing them in the trash. Rory returned to watching Mrs. Kim hawk the vegan food.

She was too tired, too overwhelmed, too distracted to think about Jess. She avoided thinking about him as a rule, the never-quite-resolved, first, passionate, all-or-nothing love affair that had intermittedly consumed her over the years. It was a childhood relationship that she missed when she watched bad romantic comedies, or read one of her books that still had the scribbles of his neat, purposeful handwriting. But she didn't know him anymore. She had never really gotten to know the new, grown up version of Jess, the successful literary artist that ran an independent book store in Philadelphia and cultivated culture with his equally artistic work buddies. He had tried to show her, when he showed up in Hartford and gave her his book, but Logan had ruined their chance to catch up. And later, when she visited him in Philly, so misguided and selfish, she had gotten to see a glimpse of someone that intimidated her. He was as brilliant and intellectual and capable as she had always imagined. It was odd to see him in a blazer, directing a literary event, a published author.

She went on dates and built relationships and ended relationships without really thinking about him, only remembering his searching half smile and leather jacket when she saw glimpses of him in town. Her last relationship, Rodger, had lasted for a year or so, but ended in the early summer when Rory felt as if the spark was lost. Maybe, at twenty-eight years old, she was being naïve, but she still wanted some fireworks and chemistry in the mix.

Thoughts wandering, Rory pulled herself back into reality. She appreciated Jess' concern, his evident, quiet support for Luke, and therefore for her and her mom, during these last few days. But she quit thinking about both the past and her failed romantic life and just kept her chilled fingers wrapped tightly around the hot mug of coffee. She could retroactively psychoanalyze her relationships all she wanted, but she still didn't have the words, or the thoughts, to figure out how to express how she felt today.

* * *

When Lorelai finally announced that it was time for them to head home, and Luke offered to drive them both in his truck, Rory followed wearily. Jess had long ago disappeared through the curtain, up the stairs into the old apartment.

She thought of her grandfather's casket, nestled in the damp earth, scattered with soggy leaves. Her grandmother asleep in bed. Her mom's head leaning on Luke's shoulder as he drove one-handed, his arm around her shoulders.

Wrapping her arms around herself, she sat in the backseat and watched the houses flit by. Fall was usually a happy time for her and her mom, full of the promises of harvest festivals and family time and scarves. But, as a professional adult, overcome with grief and exhaustion, she found the whole season decidedly depressing.

The rain continued to patter softly throughout the night. She flicked the light on, reading her old, worn Vonnegut copy, needing to slip into someone else's apathy and horror. Finally she began to find the words that had been escaping her all day. " _How nice – to feel nothing and still get full credit for being alive._ " She sank into Vonnegut's surreal emotional emptiness, and gradually, as the sun rose, slipped into slaughterhouse dreams.

* * *

On Saturday morning her mom took her to Luke's for breakfast before driving her to the train station in Hartford. "Hey, thank Jess for me, for letting me have you for the week," Lorelai said, holding out her mug for more coffee.

Luke filled her mug up, "No problem. He's already back in Philly. I told him to swing by during the holidays sometime."

Rory listened absently. Her thoughts were on her laptop tucked in her purse, full of dozens of emails that she needed to go through on the train. She had a hundred things to edit before they went to print tomorrow. She was already tired thinking about the commute.

"I'm actually gonna visit him, in a few weeks," Luke continued, rolling his eyes, "he's moving apartments so I offered to help. He said no about twenty times but I don't trust his dumbass roommates to help him with the heavy lifting."

"Are the dumbass roommates coming with him?" Lorelai grinned, "nothing like moving with the cast of dumb and dumber."

"No, that's the point of moving. Leaving the dumbasses," Luke sighed, "moving closer to the girlfriend."

Rory's head was still wrapped in the emails that she had skimmed through that morning, but she did catch the words Jess, moving, and girlfriend.

Lorelai wrinkled her nose, "I still don't like her. Too moody. They're moody together. All they do is mood."

"You've met her?" Rory asked, confused at how much her mother seems to know about Jess' perennially mysterious, withdrawn Philadelphia life.

"He's been coming around more lately," Lorelai explained, "And Luke goes up there to visit so sometimes I tag along to take advantage of all of the cheap shopping that Philly has to offer. Jess _loveees_ having me there."

Luke just grunted.

"He's getting better at the family thing," Lorelai conceded, and then dropped her voice to a whisper, "They miss each other."

Luke grunted and vanished back into the kitchen. Lorelai smiled after him. "I think he's really enjoying the whole Dad thing."

Rory thought about Jess, confident, leaning against the counter, dark and a successfully published author. He didn't seem like he needed a Dad necessarily. But then again Luke didn't need a son. Maybe it was more of a Lorelai-Rory relationship, something resembling friendship and support and bantering (or bickering). She tried to imagine Jess visiting Luke, bringing some equally moody and artistically talented girlfriend with him, Luke probably disapproving while Jess shot back equal disapproval about the puppy-dog expression that Luke wore every time Lorelai walked in. She couldn't picture it.

"Alright kiddo," Lorelai stood up, patting Rory's back, "let's go to the train. Time for you to get back to the New York grind."

Rory groaned, "I don't want to."

"Real life awaits," Lorelai waited, patiently, "You know how proud your grandfather would be that you're headed back to work, making your mark on the Sunday edition of the uppity New York Times, living in your uppity uptown apartment and taking advantage of that shiny Yale degree."

"Yeah I know," Rory buttoned her coat, "he would be."

"I'm proud too," Lorelai squeezed her.

On the drive to Hartford Rory watched the fall foliage flash by, Connecticut brighter and more beautiful than it had been on the day of the funeral. The sun was filtering through the leaves. It was still cold, a brisk wind whirling the leaves over the road, but it felt warmer than it had a few days earlier in the dreary church courtyard.

Rory glanced at her mom. The ring on her finger was glinting in the weak fall sunlight.

"Mom, when's the next date?"

Lorelai looked at her ring too. "Oh I think we're going to wait until sixty. Senior wedding. I heard it's way more fun with bridge and shuffleboard."

Rory snorted. "No, really."

"Not sure, sweets," Lorelai fluttered her fingers, "haven't talked about it."

The date had been in October, right around this same time, two years ago. But when her grandfather got sick Lorelai and Luke postponed, canceling the event reservations and the caterer and the florist and the invitations. Rory had helped her mom phone everyone, making fresh pots of coffee every time her mom put her head down on her folded arms. Luke had taken the delay stoically enough. They spent Friday nights and Tuesday nights at the Gilmore house every week, attending family dinners even as Richard grew weaker and paler. The ring stayed on Lorelai's finger but it looked lonely, forgotten, especially now in the pale light filtering through the tree branches.

"Maybe that's what you do next," Rory suggested, "make a new date."

"Maybe," Lorelai glanced over and gave her a quick smile, "but I think we'll wait until the holidays are over. Get mom through the season. Clean up the house, move her out into a smaller place. Hire the next fifty maids for her to fire at will, line 'em up execution squad style."

"She loves planning weddings," Rory pointed out.

Lorelai watched the road, casually tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. "That's very true. Hey guess the shiny Yale degree really is working out, huh?"

Rory smiled.

* * *

She kissed her mother goodbye at the train platform and found a seat by a window. As the train wound its way south, through the thick Connecticut fall foliage, sun splaying across the keyboard of her laptop, she put everything that had happened in the last week on the back burner. She read through every email, every article, tapping out razor sharp comments and responses and sending each opinion out into the internet ether. She finished her coffee as the skyscrapers of Manhattan loomed in the distance, growing larger. When the train disappeared into the dark underbelly of the island, into the secret underworld of platforms under Penn Station, she felt her adult self quickly coming back.

She departed the train, heels clicking on the platform, her rolling suitcase behind her and her laptop tucked into her oversized purse. When she surfaced on 34th street she hailed a cab, climbed in, and let it zoom her uptown. Back in the fast pace of the city, removed from the sleepy, timeless quiet of Stars Hollow, she felt as if the week never happened at all.

But in true Vonnegut style, it came back to her in surrealist bits and pieces. _And nothing hurt_ , she told herself, stripping out of her filthy work clothes and stepping into the nearly scalding water of the tiny shower in her tidy apartment.

When she finally wrapped herself in a robe and crawled into her bed, snuggled in the comforter, seeing the city lights twinkle out the window of her apartment, she opened Slaughterhouse Five and saw one of Jess' rare annotations in a Vonnegut novel. He didn't write much in Vonnegut, he told her, because most of what he had to say was already written.

 _And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep_ , wrote Vonnegut.

Beside it, in that familiar script, Jess had wrote, "The present is ours to lose."


	2. Winter is for Whiskey and Woolf

**Winter is for Whiskey and Woolf**

When winter whirled upon New York City, blanketing the taxi cabs and dirty sidewalks in gray, ugly snow, Rory put Vonnegut back on the shelf. She didn't feel the same urge to slip through time and emotions unscathed, wrapped in a careful emotional shield of apathy and work stress. She missed her grandfather but she did not need Vonnegut to coach her through it anymore, skipping from memory to present, from present to future, from the paper to bed. When she walked down 5th avenue, heading to the office, heeled boots firm on the slushy pavement and black coat wrapped tightly around her body, she remembered Woolf. _You cannot find peace by avoiding life_.

She had not been avoiding life, per say, but she certainly had not been actively participating. Now, as the enormous, decadent Christmas tree rose from the ice rink at Rockefeller and window shoppers crowded the sidewalks, Rory remembered her grandfather and felt her sadness tinged with peace. Life would move on, as it always did, especially in this city where everything was impermanent and fluid and grasping.

Her phone rang. "Hello?"

"Hey daughter of mine," her mom chirped, "when's your train?"

"Three," Rory checked her watch, "I should be in between 5 and 6, depending on the weather."

"Great. I'll be there with Luke in his truck cause the Jeep has decided to hibernate, or perhaps go into a coma, for the last week. It's very ill, send it your thoughts and prayers."

"Will do. I'll send a note and flowers too," Rory waited for the light, staying safely back from the street to avoid the slush thrown by the car tires. "What's the plan for Christmas?"

"Mom will be joining us in Stars Hollow," Lorelai gave a hollow laugh, "so, gird your loins. Bolster the ramparts. Also, Luke, so really this is a medieval showdown just waiting to happen."

"Grandma likes Luke," Rory protested.

"Yes, well, I'm expecting the worst. Beheadings. Sookie and Jackson and the kids are joining us too."

"Beheadings," Rory agreed.

"See you later, sweets," Lorelai blew a kiss into the phone.

"Bye, Mom."

Her day at work flew by in a haze of meetings, lipstick stained coffee cups, quick emails, and strict instructions to her staffers. She had snagged five days off for the holidays, and felt slightly guilty as she watched the young staffers and senior administrators that were hunkering in the for the lonely weekend, tending the press and keeping an eye on the world while everyone else enjoyed family and food and festivities. At two o'clock she left her neat office, turned off the light, locked the door, and grabbed her little black wheeled suitcase. She felt a sense of relief when she left the elevators and headed out onto the busy street, not even minding the cold as she waited to hail a cab.

The snow whirled aggressively against the windows of the train, and she could feel the engines strain against the winter blizzard. She read Virginia Woolf, flicking through the stiff pages of a new paperback because she couldn't find her old one. Virginia carried her to Hartford. _It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road_.

She could feel Woolf sliding her from her Vonnegut's sub-reality. Virginia had too much reality. Her reality made the train feel like a dream.

* * *

Luke and Lorelai were eager to see her, Lorelai engulfing her in a screechy, loud hug that only ended when Luke pulled her off and gave Rory a brief, one-armed squeeze. "In the car, in the car, we're off to the winter festival!" Lorelai sang.

Rory could practically see Luke's irritation wafting off of his tense shoulders. "Luke, you going?"

"Nope, back to the diner," he said. "I can avoid Taylor's meddling better behind a locked door."

"If the door is locked, how are we supposed to get our coffee?" Rory asked, concerned.

"Your mother has a key."

Lorelai clapped her hands, "So much power. So much coffee."

Luke's truck made short work of the snowy roads, and before long they were pulling into the little town, all bedecked in lights and holiday decorations. Despite herself, Rory smiled. She loved the holiday spirit of Stars Hollow, the homey energy of the town square and the never ending festivals and celebrations. She recognized the contest collection of village-people snowmen, and Taylor's little cart for selling old fashioned ice cream and sodas, even in a foot of snow. The square was crowded with people.

"Drop us off here Luke!" Lorelai had spotted a little coffee cart.

"Traitor. Addict." Luke pulled over, "get out."

Lorelai kissed him on the cheek. "Love you. Rory?"

Rory glanced down at her fancy black heeled work boots. Perhaps not the best for the snow layering the ground, but she supposed if they could survive the slushy streets of Manhattan then Stars Hollow couldn't do too much damage to them.

Her mother dragged her to the coffee cart, and quickly rectified their respective under-caffeinated states. Rory held the cup in her gloved hands, appreciating both the warmth and the energy jolt.

"Alright," Lorelai spun her around, "now off to judge the snowmen. And I mean _judge,_ baby girl. I don't want to hear any of your politically-correct, professional-editor, well-crafted constructive criticism. Just pure, bitchy, off-the-cuff high school girl comments."

"You got it," Rory agreed. They stood in front of the line of snow beings.

"I think the two on the left have a thing for each other," Lorelai observed.

"I think the one on the right is staring a little _too_ much at your chest."

"Dirty bastard." Lorelai gave the offending snowman a rude hand signal. "Where's Bjork? I miss Bjork."

Rory pursed her lips, "No one was creative enough this year. Bjork was born of two geniuses."

"I miss them. All of these suck."

"Definitely."

A deep voice startled both of them. "Hey, the one in the middle is great."

Rory and Lorelai turned around. Standing in front of them, or towering really, was Dean. His hand was clasped to a little pink mitten that was attached to a girl, probably about five years old, with an equally pink hat and two long brown braids. "We did the one in the middle," he offered, "recognize the scarf?"

Sure enough, the one in the middle was wearing a scarf the exact same shade of pink as the little girl's mitten and hat combo. Rory raised her eyebrows, "Ah, well, the middle one is the clear winner. Great fashion sense."

"Oh hello pumpkin," Lorelai kneeled down, pulling the strings of the girl's hat playfully, "how are you? Dad treating you right? Got the proper amount of ice cream and hot chocolate?"

The girl nodded shyly. Dean smiled, "Rory, you remember Eliza?"

Rory waved, "Hey, Eliza."

The girl waved back.

"You know, I don't think your dad has really done his duty when it comes to hot chocolate," Lorelai offered her hand to the girl, "You want to come with me, Lizzy? I need a coffee refill anyway."

The little girl took her hand, glancing up at her dad. Dean waved her off, "Go, be with Lorelai. Get more sugar, cause god knows you haven't had enough of that already."

Eliza broke into a wide smile, and walked hand-in-hand with Lorelai back to the coffee cart. Rory stayed with Dean, holding her coffee cup and watching the pair of girls walk away.

"She's really cute, Dean," Rory said, sincerely. "You did good."

Dean grinned, shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat. "Yeah, she's alright. Gives me less hell than her little brother, that's for sure."

"I still can't believe you have kids," Rory shook her head, "how did that happen?"

If Dean were any other guy, he would have made a birds and the bees joke. But instead he just looked happy. "I'm not sure. I give Jen all the credit."

Rory had met Jen a few times over the years. She had gone to Stars Hollow high school also, and was a good match for Dean. She was warm and friendly, a young teacher at the local elementary school, and it had taken hardly any time at all before the couple was married with two dogs and, rather quickly, a couple of kids. Dean seemed perfectly content being a dad. She ran into him and his kids fairly often at the diner, where Luke would make chocolate chip pancakes and Eliza and Benny, the younger brother, would clap and demand extra whipped cream.

Their history was ancient history, but history nonetheless. She always thought of Dean as a safe harbor, a harmless ex boyfriend that she truly wanted nothing but happiness for.

"I was sorry to hear about your grandfather," Dean offered, respectfully, "I heard about that a few months ago. I was going to come to the thing at Luke's but the kids both had chicken pox."

"Oh don't worry about it," Rory glanced over at her mom, "it wasn't a RSVP type of thing. But thanks. I think everything's starting to get better."

"That's good," he said. "How's work?"

"Good, good," she rocked back and forth in her heels, "I'm still at the Times. I've been editing most of the coverage for the Middle East so it's a bit draining. Living solo."

Dean raised an eyebrow, "What happened to that guy? Rodger?"

Rory shrugged. "Didn't work out."

"He seemed nice."

"Yeah, he was," Rory shrugged again, unable to bring herself to care too strongly about the whole situation. "I don't know. It just didn't have the chemistry. The spark. He was a great guy, but I moved out in May."

"Well," Dean nodded, slowly, "You shouldn't settle."

Rory agreed. Maybe she had been spoiled by her three first relationships, each a beautiful love affair in its own right. But she knew if she had it once before, she could have it again. Her mom was perhaps the best example of this. Her mom never settled, her mom played the game and waited it out until she won the grumpy, bantering, coffee-making soulmate that she deserved.

Lorelai and Eliza reappeared, each supporting identical grins and coffee cups. "And … _now_!" Lorelai exclaimed, and they each threw a snowball at Dean.

"Hey!" he jumped, managing to avoid Lorelai's but getting struck square in the chest by Eliza's. She shrieked and took off, running through the snowmen, spilling hot chocolate in the snow.

"Catch you later!" he said, and then chased after his daughter, letting her win as she raced through the crowds.

Lorelai and Rory watched them go. "They're despicably cute," Rory groaned.

"Ugh, biology," Lorelai scoffed, "thank god I'm done with that."

"Are you really done with that?" Rory asked pointedly.

"Shh, ask no questions and you shall receive no lies," Lorelai pulled her back towards the festival, "now come, let's engage in social conversation with the masses so that we can get back to Luke's and proper coffee and less miniature humans."

Rory shadowed her mother as they made the rounds, wishing happy holidays and seasons greetings to Miss Patty and Kirk and Babette and everyone else that crowded the little square, bundled up in winter layers and enjoying the light snow that fell, dusting the lampposts and the benches. Finally, Lorelai decided it was time to leave the winter revelry and head back to Luke's, but when they were across the street Taylor promptly intercepted them. "Lorelai, we need to talk about that dratted fiancée of yours."

Lorelai dropped her head backwards rather dramatically, "Taylor, I've told you, my leverage with him? Gone. You know how impossible I am to deal with? Impossible. I gotta use all my womanly wiles just to keep the ring."

"No, no, you hear me out now," Taylor pulled her away.

"Wait there for me!" Lorelai cried, reaching to Rory, allowing herself to be dragged away.

Rory smirked, and then turned and looked at the diner. Inside it was bright and warm and empty, the _closed_ sign on the door acting as a strong deterrent for anyone remotely festive or holiday related. She saw Luke, putting on a pot of coffee (the man was both a psychic and an angel) and the jeans and sneakers of another man, sitting at a table. Curious, she stepped to the right, to better see him, and immediately recognized both the book and the boy.

Luke rounded the corner, handing a glass of water to Jess, who took it and placed his bookmark in the book. She watched them chatting, comfortable together, Jess' legs stretched under the table, Luke leaning against the wall, holding the keys and undoubtedly waiting for Lorelai.

Standing there in the lightly falling snow, in her timeless hometown, watching Luke and Jess banter in the diner, she felt oddly transported to her teenage years again. It was surreal, watching a scene that had played out a hundred times before when she was in high school and desperately falling for the bad boy in the leather jacket.

As if to add to her déjà vu, she heard Dean's deep voice behind her again. "Which one are you staring at?"

She jumped, then shot him a look, "Just taking in the scene. Waiting on my mom." She gestured towards Lorelai, who had her arms crossed and was tapping her foot at Taylor's diatribe just up the street.

Dean glanced at Lorelai, but then gave her a knowing look, "Sure, Rory."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she rolled her eyes. Again, here she was, twenty-eight years old and a successful, professional woman, acting like she was seventeen again because something about the snow and the gazebo and the surrealness of the scene took all of her cultivated Manhattan maturity and threw it out the window. Perhaps she had put Vonnegut and his dream sequences away too soon. Woolf would have scoffed: _Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place_?

Dean appeared to be on his way towards Eliza, who was waiting just up beyond Lorelai. He raised his hands in the air, "Just saying. If your problem with your last guy was no _spark_ , I think I can remember a situation where you had more than enough of that."

He winked, and then walked away, arms swinging as he headed towards his impatient daughter.

Rory watched him go, and shook her head. Any teenage relationship had spark. Dean still lived in a high school fairy tale, a town so safely ensconced from the real world that he would never understand Rory's own romantic history. Dean didn't know that she hardly spoke to Jess, that Jess had let her kiss and use him in Truncheon, that Rory had turned down a proposal or two in the meantime and that her own opinions on love were fairly nihilistic at this point. _Spark_ had been the problem with Rodger, but she could manifest a whole host of problems for any other guy that she had been close to serious with. Jess, always her personal Pandora's box, came with his own baggage set of problems ready and waiting.

She shook the stupidity out of her head, and felt relief when her mom, in a flourish of drama, escaped Taylor and quickly marched Rory to the door of Luke's.

Luke let them in quickly, perhaps sensing Taylor's nearby irritation on his radar, and firmly locked the door behind them when both women were inside and breathless and dripping melted snow onto the floor.

"For god's sake, stand on the rug," he said, exasperated, taking Lorelai's coat.

Rory shrugged out of her long black New Yorker coat, hanging it on a hook by the door. Her mom, impetuous as always, took off her boots, ("Fine, fine, because god forbid the _floor_ experience _moisture_ , what, was it newly permed?") kicked them by the door, and flung herself into a chair across from Jess. Lorelai gave him a grimace, "Oh hello Jess, how does it feel to be wearing shoes and not standing on a rug? Good? Comforting? Socially acceptable?"

The corner's of Jess' mouth twitched. "Call it privilege of the male heir."

"Oh good, patriarchal shoe requirements, my favorite," she pulled the chair next to it out for Rory, "child of mine, leave the fancy professional footwear, take a seat."

Rory sufficiently dried her boots on the rug, and chose to keep them on when she joined the table. As she walked she noticed Jess notice her boots, his slight half smile growing.

"Hey, Jess," she said, giving him a half wave.

"Hey," he pushed his book to the edge of the table, clearing the main space. "How's the festival?"

"Well to be honest the snowmen were lackluster, no personality, the coffee weak, and the townspeople had far too few torches and pitchforks," Lorelai snapped her fingers at Luke, "hey, future hubby, this table has three too few mugs of coffee on it."

Luke, who was pulling the freshly brewed coffee pot out of the machine and already had three mugs balanced in one hand, gave her a dirty scowl. She made a face, "Sorry, bossman."

Luke deposited the mugs in front of the three addicts, filled each with steaming coffee, and then took the chair next to Jess. Lorelai reached her hand out across the table and, to Rory's amusement, he only barely grimaced before taking it and preemptively kicking Jess' leg under the table. Jess' half smile was perfectly visible at this point.

"So Jess, what brings you here for the holidays? Get an urge to vandalize any snowmen recently?" Lorelai sipped her coffee, eyes dancing, "palm trees too boring this year? Sick of that godawful sun and sand and surf? Didn't the Beach Boys make a perfectly ageless Christmas album?"

Jess sipped his coffee, "No vandalizing yet, but in my opinion you're right, they should all be demolished. And no they went to visit Lily's family in the Midwest."

"Liz might stop by here," Luke said, "or she said something about an Elizabethan Christmas banquet hall in Pennsylvania."

"Oh good, because nothing says Christmas like persecuting Catholics and using bird masks to fight the bubonic plague," Lorelai quipped. "Would bloody mary's be considered 'too soon' at an Elizabethan dinner?"

Rory watched Jess roll his eyes, "As much as I hate this town's stupid festivals, it doesn't come close to the possibility of having to witness TJ in tights again."

This time, Rory definitely saw Luke grimace. She grinned.

"So then, what's new, kiddo?" Lorelai asked.

Jess shrugged. Luke responded for him. "So far I've gathered that there's a new book coming out 'sometime' within the next year, the new apartment is 'a perfectly acceptable shithole,' and his friends are doing…" Luke pantomimed a sarcastic thumbs up sign.

"The dumbass friends?"

"Yep," Jess said.

Rory watched him, impressed by how totally at ease he was with Luke and Lorelai. One of his hands was lightly drumming the table, and the other loosely held the mug of coffee. He didn't look hardly any different from a few months ago. This time he was more casual, in a familiar Henley and jeans combination, but she could tell that his dark eyes were entirely amused by both her mom's antics and Luke being utterly whipped. He had the same confidence, unaffected by either the couple next to him or even Rory's occasionally searching glance.

"And Rory, how's the paper?" Luke asked.

"Great, busy" she pulled her mug into her lap, holding it with both hands, "I've been editing all of the main coverage on Syria and Iraq. It's exhausting but it's always interesting, and it means I'm setting myself up to get to be a foreign policy analyst for the next election cycle. Oh, and most importantly, they gave me an office with a window this year."

Jess watched her, half smile fading but still intact, intently listening. She felt a little self-conscious, but also proud. Considering that he had witnessed her lowest, DAR, tweed-wearing, partying, ambitionless self, and played a rather pivotal role in snapping her out of it, she felt a sense of retribution in being able to cite these professional successes in his presence.

"Yes, a whole _window_ ," Lorelai nodded impressively, "they're really improving those New York cells, aren't they?"

"I also get an occasional lunch break and, if I'm really lucky, free weekends," Rory said, "what can I say, I'm a lucky woman."

"Eh, you're working hard kid, you're doing good," Luke topped off Lorelai's coffee, "Lorelai, how'd we get such smart kids?"

"No idea," Lorelai said, "literate and everything. Even toilet trained. Partially adept at small talk. It's a miracle."

Rory and Jess exchanged a pained look. She recognized the twist of his eyebrows, the sarcastic, _can you believe this_ note in his forehead, but she wasn't used to it being accompanied by that little half smirk. He seemed lighter, as if the anger that had incinerated their first relationship had gradually consumed itself over the years.

The conversation rose and fell, humorous and natural, and Rory found herself getting tired even as she grasped a mug of coffee, sitting at such a cozy table as the snow piled on the windowsill and the townspeople returned to their warm homes. She always enjoyed her mom's quick wit and Luke's gruff, no-nonsense quips, but it was refreshing to have Jess there to parry back and forth too. He was quick witted and merciless, using similar Lorelai barbs but drawn from different cultural references. More than once she found herself laughing at his cheeky humor, or the exasperated face that he would shoot her whenever her mom and Luke did anything particularly gooey and cute.

"I hate to leave a table with such fine upstanding gentlemen, but if we're going to suffer through the presence of Emily Gilmore for the next few days, Rory and I need our beauty sleep," Lorelai put her arm around Rory's shoulders, "pray for us, boys."

"I'll be right there with you, dealing with it," Luke pointed out. "And by extension, so will Jess."

"Then we all need our beauty sleep. Especially Jess," said Lorelai.

Jess mocked hurt, "Ouch."

Luke stood and grabbed their coats. Lorelai struggled to put on her boots, and Rory cinched the belt around the waist of her black coat. Jess stayed at the table, absently spinning a quarter, dark eyes following their movements.

"Jess, see you in the morning?" Luke paused, "lock the door behind us?"

"Yessir," Jess gave him a tired salute.

Luke opened the door. "Bye," Rory waved, before she stepped back out into the frosty night. She hurried to the truck, feeling his eyes still following her, knowing just how odd she looked still dressed up in her New York work clothes.

* * *

The next two days of Christmas preparations went by in a blur of mall dates with her mom and grandma, entirely too much peppermint hot chocolate and holiday themed movies on ABC family, and solid hours in both Luke's diner and Lane's house, avoiding the sometimes tense, sometimes sad, and sometimes absolutely normal bickering between her mom and her grandma. Since the funeral they were certainly closer, but it still didn't change the fundamental differences between the two older Gilmore women. Rory mediated and maneuvered, but often left her mom to laugh off Emily's criticism of the paint colors, or Emily to primly ignore Lorelai's childish jokes.

On Christmas Eve Lorelai and Rory found themselves alone for lunch when Emily claimed an absolute need for last minute shopping. Like weary soldiers returning home from battle they trooped to Luke's, breaking a path through the snow.

Luke brought them burgers and fries and coffee and surprise appetizers, and Rory felt warm and at home, perfectly centered in reality, as she joked with her mom. Jess was sitting at the far end of the counter with his head down, reading a book, occasionally scribbling notes. When they were in high school he would glance at her every few pages, searching for her voice and movements. Now she found him entirely absorbed in the literature, not paying attention to anything or anyone in the room except for the book.

"So, how are you feeling about the J situation?" her mom mock whispered.

Rory almost laughed. "The J situation? Hearkening back to the times of old, are we now?"

Lorelai shrugged, "It's not like much has changed with you two since the times of old, no?"

"No," Rory acquiesced, "no nothing much has changed. I haven't spoken to him alone. We're not active friends, so to speak. Friendly for sure. Friendish."

Lorelai nodded, popping a few fries into her mouth.

"Speaking of, though, what is up with _you_ and the whole J situation?" Rory raised her eyebrows, "since when are you two friendish in any way?"

Lorelai shrugged, "Since he started spending more time with Luke. He's up here every couple of months. I told you we go down there to visit him sometimes. He's really mellowed out. Less anger management, more insufferable hipster know it all."

Rory absorbed this, looking at his familiar figure hunched on the bar stool, one of his hands repetitively flipping a pencil as he quietly tore through the text.

* * *

Christmas day proved Virginia correct, once again. _One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well_.

Sookie utterly outdid herself, somehow producing a monstrous amount of gourmet food from Rory and Lorelai's ill equipped and neglected kitchen. The kids ran chattering and screaming throughout the house, tormenting Paul Anka and causing Luke to take headache medication before they had even had appetizers. Emily sat quite regally on the armchair in the living room, holding a glass of champagne and looking both softer and older in the flickering lights of the Christmas tree.

Rory was wearing a soft, slouchy gray sweater and dark jeans, her hair in a messy ponytail, chatting with her grandmother and drinking champagne. It was only two in the afternoon, but if Emily thought it was appropriate to be drinking, and Virginia certainly thought it was appropriate, then who was Rory to disagree. Jess seemed to be on the same page when he walked by, holding a short bar glass filled with scotch or whiskey, unintentionally and momentarily reminding both women of Rory's grandfather.

"We're all thinking about him today, Grandma," Rory promised.

Emily gave her a brief smile, composed. "He would like that."

They ate at a large, awkward patchwork table composed of the kitchen table and a card table. Emily suggested setting up a different card table in the foyer, for the kids, and Luke was only too happy to agree. Rory sat beside her mom, smiling, overwhelmed by the warmth and energy in the room. Jess was at the opposite end, on the other side of Luke, but occasionally she caught his eye and he would almost imperceptibly tip his glass to her, giving her that same subtle, searching nod that he had in Luke's diner the night of her grandfather's funeral. _You okay?_

 _Okay enough._ The room felt emptier without the grand presence of her grandfather, regaling them with stories and offering cigars to the men. But she could not be unhappy with so much love surrounding her, with this mismatched, fast-talking, absurd family configuration.

After Sookie brought out four different kinds of dessert, including an elaborate plum pudding and a peanut butter brittle cake, Lorelai called the table to attention. "Hey hey," she called, tapping her knife against her wine glass.

Rory looked at her mother expectantly. When Lorelai had the attention of all of the adults, and a few of the kids peering around the corner, she smiled and fluttered the fingers on her left hand, letting her ring sparkle in the candlelight. "We know it's been a long time, but now that everything has calmed down a bit with the Inn and family, we're setting a new date."

Rory and Jackson cracked identical smiles, and Sookie squealed. "Oh, when is it, when is it?"

"July 14th," Luke said, looking happy despite himself.

"Summer wedding in the town square," Lorelai added, "but unfortunately not Renaissance themed. We were considering Middle Ages. Perhaps Ancient Rome. Maybe even Lord of the Rings. It'll be a mystery, but both historically appropriate _and_ exciting. Preferably with a ceremonial sword."

"Oh for heaven's sake, Lorelai," said Emily, shaking her head in disapproval and reaching for her wine glass. But Rory saw that her grandmother's face had brightened, the corners of her mouth slightly higher, a hint of her usual planning and plotting self reappearing in the laugh wrinkles around her eyes.

"Sookie, obviously, we want you to do the food," Lorelai said, bowing to her friend, "and mom, I'd love your help too. I'm overwhelmed at work right now, so anything you want to help out with just let me know."

Emily tilted her head, "I'll have to check my schedule. But I daresay I'll be able to find some time."

"Great," Lorelai shot her an obvious smile, then turned to face Rory, "and you, missy, Maid of Honor, wicked bachelorette party responsibilities, you may need to quit your job to handle the enormity of the task in front of you."

Luke choked, nearly spitting out his beer, but Rory gave her a solemn salute. "Aye-aye, Captain."

"And Jess," Lorelai winked at him, "make sure Luke sits down for at least one lap dance."

Jess gave a similar salute, mocking both Rory and his uncle in one go.

"Sookie, dear, we'll handle the actual wedding," Emily leaned across Jackson to pat Sookie on the arm, "if we do a good enough job perhaps no one will even notice that Lorelai is there."

Sookie giggled and nodded, already scribbling menu notes on her napkin. Jackson raised his glass, "Cheers to the happy couple. And happy holidays to all of you."

They all cheered, quite exuberantly, and Rory leaned back in her chair, watching Lorelai whisper in Luke's ear and Sookie excitedly bounce dish ideas off of Jackson. She felt a smile continuously tugging at the corners of her mouth, brought on by the warmth and wine that seemed to be in limitless supply at the mismatched table.

* * *

When the evening grew late Sookie and Jackson piled their sleepy kids in the car and drove through the snow back to their house. Her mom and Luke put Emily, who had had just enough champagne to be giggly and sleepy, to bed in Rory's old room and then, exhausted, disappeared upstairs. She stayed on the couch, legs curled beneath her, sipping a glass of wine and reading Woolf's _A Room of One's Own_ in the soft light of the Christmas tree.

Jess, who had disappeared onto the porch for a long phone conversation, reappeared in the living room. He sat on the other end of the couch, leaving a full cushion between them, rubbing his hands together and shivering.

"A bit cold out there for a long chat, no?" Rory asked, watching him curiously.

"It wasn't supposed to be a long chat," he replied, collapsing backwards into the cushion.

She peered at him more closely. He had his arms crossed, his eyes focused on the tree, eyebrows slightly furrowed. "Need a drink?" she offered.

He gave her a one-shouldered shrug. She placed her wine and her book on the coffee table and headed into the kitchen. Thanks to Logan, and another former high rolling boyfriend of hers, she had developed a fairly decent skill set when it came to bartending. Within a few minutes she constructed an Old Fashioned with hardly a touch of simple syrup because she knew Jess, of all people, could handle his whiskey.

Nonchalant, feeling quite adult, she returned to the living room, handed the glass to him over his shoulder, and then curled her legs up onto the couch. She picked up her wine glass but not the book.

"Woolf?" Jess asked, reading the title upside-down.

"Felt like the season for it," she said. Then she hesitated, "After the funeral I was only really in a Vonnegut mood."

He considered this. _"If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality_ ," he quoted. "Yeah I suppose Woolf composes an accurate transition."

She nodded. They each sipped their drink, gazing at nothing in particular, caught up in their own thoughts.

"So, why the extended phone call? Christmas not dangerous enough for you? Needed the threat of hypothermia or frostbite?"

He took another sip of his drink, "Not quite. Thanks for this, by the way, you're not half bad with the whiskey."

Rory raised her glass to him. "You pick up unexpected talents as life goes on."

Jess was quiet for a few moments. He had stopped shivering but his dark blazer still looked a bit too damp for comfort. She tossed him the throw blanket that was folded over her arm of the couch.

He gave her a skeptical, come-off-it look, but nevertheless took off his blazer and wrapped himself in the blanket. Beneath the blazer he was wearing a Clash t-shirt. She bit the inside of her lip to stop herself from smiling. If it weren't for the whiskey he would look seventeen again with his wet hair and the faded band t-shirt.

"I was supposed to be at my girlfriend's for Christmas."

"Oh?" Rory said, "so why are you here?"

Jess seemed fairly unbothered. "It didn't feel right. We got into a bad fight a couple weeks ago, and I've just been annoyed. Didn't want to show up and ruin her family Christmas."

"And that was her on the phone?"

"Nothing gets passed you, Miss Gilmore," Jess's voice was sarcastic, but not cruel. "Good thing you majored in journalism."

She sipped her wine. "Sorry Jess. That sounds rough."

He quoted Virginia again, his voice slightly raspy from the whiskey. " _Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unresolved problems_." His eyes were fixed on the corner of the coffee table. "I've been with her for two years."

"Wow," Rory felt surprised, "commitment and everything, huh?"

"Yeah," he shifted on the couch, "almost moved in with her. But she's wanting to be more serious and I'm just not into that. I'm twenty-eight, I don't need to be picking out curtains or spending holidays with parents."

Privately, internally, Rory could already sketch out the girlfriend's side of the whole scenario and empathize with her. But at the same time, based on how Jess had behaved this weekend, he didn't exactly seem like the type to blow off typical relationship actions because of an inability to be serious. He was very serious, Hemingway serious, with the deeply introspective observation skills of Sal Paradise. Jess had never been frivolous about anything. If he cared about something, like books, or a job, he never treated it as anything remotely similar to a laughing matter. He was intense and demanding, questioning and serious, but just detached enough to maintain calm and control.

Rory did not press him further. She sipped her wine again, feeling the light buzz, the Christmas lights flickering, the warmth of the living room.

Jess shook his head, as if clearing his thoughts. "What about you? Where's the boyfriend?"

"Broke up with him in May," Rory replied. "Moved out. Found my own apartment."

Jess glanced up at her, catching her eye, "Is this the same boyfriend that…?"

Rory realized that he was asking about Logan, about the boyfriend that had treated Jess like scum in the bar in Hartford. The boyfriend that she had used Jess to get back at. The boyfriend that she had claimed to be in love with after she coerced Jess into kissing her in the bookstore in Truncheon, playing with the open strings of his heart, wrapping him into her bubble and then immediately getting cold feet and shattering the whole, beautiful illusion.

She had seen the hurt and the anger in his eyes. But he had maintained his cool, his body posture perfectly collected, even offering that she could make up any story she liked about them to get back at Logan. He had told her in that blunt, collected way of his that she wasn't being fair to him, that he didn't deserve the way she was treating him. And he had been entirely right. When she was at her lowest, at her most depressed, she often thought of that moment and winced at her own behavior. How cruel she had been, to mislead Jess and then admit she was in love with Logan. And how calm Jess had been, watching her with those serious eyes, offering himself up to Logan's imagination so that she could leave with what she came for.

"No, a different one," she said, nearly relieved. "Logan and I broke up when I graduated."

He raised his eyebrows, "Long time ago."

She nodded, "He wanted more than I could give."

"Sounds familiar."

They lapsed back into silence. Rory finished her wine and contemplated the empty glass, considering going in for the bottle. When Jess' eyebrows only seemed to draw closer together she made up her mind and returned to the kitchen, fetching both the wine bottle and the whiskey and bringing them back to the coffee table.

Jess snorted. "Feeling festive?"

"Festive enough," she filled up her glass, "why not. It's Christmas, I'm sleeping on this couch."

"Fair enough," he tilted his glass and finished his drink, and then poured himself another shot of whiskey, this time straight up.

"So do you have fiction or women on your mind?" she asked, referencing his earlier Woolf quote.

He looked amused. "Both."

"I wish those were my thoughts too," Rory sighed, "instead of word limits and incompetent use of the passive voice and formatting the editorial."

"Less heartbreak in the daily details," he pointed out.

"Less everything," she agreed.

He slouched further into the couch. She kept her eyes on his profile. Jess looked both concentrated and exhausted, his thoughts, as always, spinning far away where she could never reach them. Rory was used to it at this point, after so many years. He spoke in brief responses, saving his words and his thoughts for torrents of written paragraphs.

"I think I'm going to end it," he said, almost decisively.

Rory did not have a response for that one. She had never met the mysterious girlfriend, or heard anything about Jess' relationship other than her mom's snarky comments. So, remaining quiet and respectful, acting as a listener, she just sipped her wine and let his line of dialogue linger in the air, incomplete, floating.

He didn't seem particularly bothered to elaborate. After a lengthy, comfortable period of silence, in which she sipped her wine and traced patterns in her sweater, he downed the rest of his whiskey, slid his glass onto the coffee table, and stood up. He handed her the blanket and put on his blazer.

"Back to the diner?" she asked.

"Yep," he said, buttoning his coat.

She looked up at him, calm, tranquil from the wine. Her thoughts were coming in colorful splashes, scraps of emotion and observation and nostalgia.

Jess put his hands in his pockets and gave her that familiar wry, half smile. "Ignore the whiskey-induced mutterings of a proven lunatic."

"Lunatics make the world interesting," she said.

"Maybe," he looked towards the front door, and then returned his weary eyes to her. "Thanks for the hospitality. I'll see you around."

"Anytime," she said, and she meant it. "Apparently you're family now."

Jess nodded, briefly amused by the observation, and then turned towards the door. As he left she could see his face falling back into that concentrated furrow, his shoulders tense, his steps quick and purposeful. He opened the door and quickly closed it behind him, keeping the swirls of snow out of the foyer.

She finished her wine and settled back into the couch, stretching out and resuming her book. Her thoughts were whirling just like the snowflakes outside, sometimes in dangerous directions, dark, secret pockets of her mind that she had kept firmly guarded for years. She felt nothing particularly strongly about her drink with Jess, but as she read, half-focused, she felt the wine drawing up idle questions and observations. What was this woman's name, who was about to have to form her own lock and key for the part of her heart that Jess had taken? And where was he, in the vortex of possible emotions, his gaze so concentrated as he somehow added up the pieces in his head and decided that the end of another beginning had come?

Were she sober, Rory would probably slap herself out of these thoughts and refocus on Woolf, intent on the prose, pushing Jess's intensity directly back to where it belonged, deep in her subconscious. But instead she let Virginia give her permission to allow wine-scented thoughts lull her into sleep. _There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind_.

* * *

Like clockwork, her mom brought her to Luke's again before driving her to the train station. This time, in addition to her French toast and bacon and coffee, Luke also handed her a worn paperback book. "Here. I was told to give this to you."

"Wow, look at this man," Lorelai sipped her coffee, "makes food, delivers messages, reads books. Full package."

"I didn't read that," Luke said quickly.

Lorelai tilted her neck to read the title. "Oh, Virginia Woolf. Yeah can't say I see you reading that one, Luke. But if you need some repressed feminist wartime depression, you know where to find it now."

Rory picked up the familiar book, a little more creased and a little more stained than it was the last time she saw it when she was in high school. There was a handwritten note on the inside front cover. _Sorry for not returning this yet. –J_

She analyzed the handwriting, still narrow and purposeful but more adult than she was used to. His script slanted more now, letters connecting with either speed or confidence, she wasn't sure.

"Thanks, Luke," she tucked it into her purse, and returned to her eggs and bacon. By that point her mom and Luke's banter had led them in an entirely different direction, and Lorelai never asked the actual reason why Luke had handed Rory a book off of her high school syllabus.

When Rory was settled on the train, laptop up and running, emails loading, coffee steam doing its part to defrost the ice on the window, she pulled the book out of her bag again. She held it in her lap and looked out over the white blur of the landscape as it flew by. The snow was deep this time of year, and in the winter wilderness she could almost imagine Virginia's own loneliness, her isolation, gazing out the windows, locked in her own depression and locked in the terror of war. If she ignored the signs of modern civilization – occasional cars or billboards – she could almost imagine she was passing through the snowy English countryside.

She let the book fall open naturally, the pages parting where the book had often been opened, the words read and reread. She recognized the passage as one of her favorites.

 _Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?_

Beside the text there were two annotations. One she recognized as Jess's high school handwriting. " _An unavoidable and necessary cliché._ "

Based on her memory of _Subsect_ , Jess had not exempted himself from Woolf's pointed observation. She had not yet read his other books but if she knew Jess at all, if she could accurately remember him cracking a slight smile upon reading this passage in the diner, scribbling a knowing comment with an air of camaraderie and shared, secret knowledge, then she wouldn't be surprised if women formed the shape and blood of each of his books. He was not a romantic but he was deeply moved by passion and emotion and complexity, and did not shy away from attempting to understand or grapple with femininity.

The second annotation was in his more recent handwriting. " _What premonition, Mrs. Woolf._ "

Rory let the book close, pressing her fingertips against the scarred cover. Her eyes were fixed on the skeleton trees dusted with snow, her mind on the tidy stack of unread books that she kept in a corner of her bookshelf, waiting in the wings, often forgotten. Too often when she thought of them she imagined discomfort; painfully beautiful, well-crafted texts littered with sharp moments of hurt and nostalgia. She had not wanted to let herself into his own private space, his literary world that she was only too sure would be too exquisite and painful for her to wrestle with.

But now, as she contemplated the short stack of books waiting quietly in her apartment, her eyes following the snowflakes outside, she did not feel the same defensive hesitance. She imagined the texts with Woolf's directness, her calm sense of blatant reality. After all, as a woman who had loved a writer she had willingly bared herself to that scrutiny.

 _Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe_?


	3. Spring is for Hemingway and Headaches

**Spring is for Hemingway and Headaches**

March arrived blustery and cold, bringing no relief from the last bitter dregs of winter. Rory hurried across the avenues, avoiding the icy wind tunnels that formed between the skyscrapers, feeling the hem of her coat whip around her knees. The sun was shining but it was a weak, feeble excuse for a sun, hardly warming the stained sidewalks and disappearing often behind rain clouds. She drank too much coffee, heavily relying on her drug of choice to combat both the chill in her fingertips and the tired lines around her eyes.

Her job had grown more demanding, especially with the new revolution that had broken out in her designated region and the widespread rise of accompanying insurgent activity. But Rory maintained her calm, requesting that the staff put in longer hours until the chaos lessened. She arrived at the office at seven in the morning and left around eight each day, developing an almost childlike dependence on her assistant's coffee runs and an unsolvable habit of occasionally falling asleep on her laptop. Her boss, the senior editor, had gruffly given her due credit for the work she was putting in. The paper continued to represent the highest standards of journalism, and she still managed to feel a hint of satisfied pride whenever she got home to her tiny apartment, kicked off her heels, and sank into the comforter, eyes closed, too tired to bother to turn off the light or put on pajamas.

Despite her hectic schedule she still maintained her reading. Besides, reading wasn't recreational for Rory. Reading was meditation, therapy, and relaxation all at once, a necessary component of her emotional wellbeing that she relied on in order to be both socially and professionally functional.

She began opening the handful of books on the shelves that were signed _Jess Mariano_. At first she found herself tense when she was reading, her shoulders raised an inch or two higher than usual, her fingers slightly white from gripping the pages too tightly. But as she sank into the prose, which was so cutting, so solemn, so vivid, so _Jess_ , she began to relax into it. After a while she dug a pencil out from her desk at work and began making notes in the margins just as Jess always did. She did not write anything hyper-critical – she left her editor self at work on purpose – but she did have the confidence to circle certain phrases with delicate asterisks, to loop faint question marks around lingering questions, and, every so often, to scribble a few contemplative words next to a paragraph.

When she first opened his sophomore novel, the heralded follow up to _Subsect_ , at a little café table next to a window on rainy Lexington, she thought she recognized herself at every turn. She imagined her influence on the sensual descriptions of a woman's perfume, on the emotionally heavy conversations that turned into alcoholic binges and smashed glass in dive bars on Venice Beach. But gradually, as she journeyed throughout the texts, she let go of her claim to the books and read them as they were, as objects of art and desire and poetry created by a talented artist. Indeed, by the time she got to the third novel, she couldn't find herself at all. Jess' muses, imaginary or otherwise, ebbed and flowed and transformed, and though a tiny part of Rory wished that she could have found her touch on each of his heroines, she found herself a stranger to them.

Perhaps the most jarring part to her, the part where she had to flip the cover closed and confirm that the name on the front said _Mariano_ , was the raw sexuality composed in elegant scenes of desire and pain. Jess had not been pining for her. If he could write sex scenes with so much passion and dignity and disgrace, with enough ragged desire and detail to cause her breath to hitch and her cheeks to burn, then he must certainly have had other muses.

She gave him a delicate exclamation point next to one such scene, and then continued turning the pages, dissolving into his work, hardly noticing the rain falling in thick gray sheets onto Lexington Avenue.

* * *

One weekend, towards the end of March, when Rory's work schedule had calmed enough to allow her to eat dinner at home occasionally and pick up Hemingway alongside Jess' books (each informed the other, she began to realize,) she got a phone call from her mom informing her that both she and Emily would be arriving in the city Saturday afternoon to go wedding dress shopping. Rory complained, but her mom shushed her with the usual "But what if this is my last wedding, Rory? What if I never get married again? What if this is my _last dress_?" Reluctantly, tiredly, she caved.

Rory met them on Fifth Avenue, stepping carefully out of a cab and over one of the many New York winter puddles that seemed like it would never truly drain away. "Ohh thank god you're here," Lorelai pulled her into a hug, "now quick, where's the nearest coffee shop?"

"Hi Grandma," Rory hugged Emily next, "um, this way, there's one on 56th I think."

"You would not _believe_ the traffic," Emily huffed, keeping quick step with Rory like a practiced New Yorker. "You would think they'd have improved the roads by now. How can they let the bridges get so crowded? One day the thing is going to collapse and we'll all be floundering in the East River."

"Mom they've only built about twelve bridges and tunnels onto the damn island," Lorelai said, "what do you want, a personal helicopter?"

"Not a bad idea for next time, Lorelai," Emily followed Rory into a crowded coffee shop, "goodness, Rory, where are we?"

Rory gave her grandmother an apologetic shrug. "Sorry, not too many options in midtown if you don't want Starbucks."

"I smell coffee, I see cups, we're good," Lorelai dragged her to the end of the line. Emily sat at a table, arms folded, staring distastefully at the plastic napkin dispensers and the obviously reheated baked goods.

When the two younger Gilmore women were appropriately caffeinated, and Emily had been handed a coffee that she didn't ask for but certainly needed, they set off for the dress shops. Rory kept up a light conversation with her grandma, asking about various social acquaintances and club updates and the like. Lorelai threw in the occasional biting insight, but let her mom enjoy the feeling of walking through the glamorous flagship fashion neighborhood in the city while chattering about societal this and that.

To Rory's relief the dress shopping went by in a blur. She sat on a variety of beautifully upholstered sofas, clutching her coffee and offering up pleasant feedback and plenty of gratitude for the employees that Emily repeatedly terrorized. Lorelai, who put on a good face for the first two places, quickly lost patience and descended into the same snappy stream of comments as Emily. She stood on a raised platform in front of the sofa, staring at herself in the full body mirror and making an uglier grimace with each successive dress.

"I mean look at it, they could have at least attempted to make the hem straight," Emily scoffed, examining the sixteenth or so dress unenthusiastically, "if they can't do a proper hem they're never going to get the fit right, Lorelai."

"No need, Mom," Lorelai gestured for Rory to unzip her, "see how many frills this has? I do not want frills. No frills necessary. I'm going to have cotillion flashbacks and end up on a PTSD rampage in the middle of the cake cutting."

"Let's not do that," Rory unzipped her, sidestepped the argument, and then returned to the sofa, "what about the fifth one? We liked the fifth one. Sleek, simple, and not even pure white, in order to avoid the cotillion trauma."

Lorelai disappeared into the fitting room, huffing, "No, that one would have required some serious spanx. Seriously, do old maids just not get married anymore?"

Rory snorted. "Mom you couldn't look old if you tried."

"Yes Lorelai, you're in remarkably good condition considering the way you conduct your life," Emily said, "Rory, she had those nasty pop tarts, the ones in the silver wrappers, in the car _again_."

"All for you, Mom," Lorelai called.

They waited, feet tapping, until Lorelai emerged. This time she gave them a knowing grin, her eyes sparkling, her hands casually resting on her hips. "Ladies, I think we found it."

To augment Rory's relief, Emily decided that bridesmaid dresses would just simply _have_ to wait until Sookie could join them. She leaned back against the sofa and watched as the dressmakers took her mom's final measurements, fastening little pins and making slight adjustments to the dress as her mom stood there, arms raised, frequently complaining.

"Hush, Lorelai, they're almost done," Emily scolded.

"Yeah, if you're not nice, they'll 'accidentally' poke you," Rory grinned.

Lorelai shot them both a withering look, "Mutiny will not be tolerated on this ship."

After the dress was carefully wrapped and put aside for altering, and Emily had quietly rung the purchase up on her credit card before Lorelai had the chance to get redressed and pay for it herself, Rory accompanied her mom and grandma for an early dinner near the theater district. At the table, over a shared bottle of wine and enough cheerful candlelight to offset the chilly spring evening, her grandma asked if Rory was seeing anyone.

"No, not right now Grandma," she played with the stem of her wine glass, "still doing that whole single in the city thing. I've been really busy with work too."

"Well it's been almost a year since Rodger," Emily said, "I can't see why you're not back up and at it again. There are plenty of nice young men in the journalism field, you know. I'm sure you must be just surrounded by them in the office.

"Yeah Rory, why _aren't_ you asking out your coworkers and subordinates at every chance you get?" Lorelai swung her head to look at Rory, eyebrows raised.

Rory sighed, smiling, "I'll let you know as soon as it happens, Grandma."

"Yeah Mom, it'll be in the news too. Sexual harassment case."

"Well I just hope you bring a date to your mother's wedding that isn't Paris Gellar," her grandma sniffed, closing the topic.

* * *

When March faded and April arrived the cold became a little less bitter, the sun slightly braver as it coaxed the cherry blossoms from the gnarled trees in Central Park. On the first truly bearable Saturday morning Rory bundled up in a coat and gloves, stopped at a coffee cart for a celebratory cappuccino, and then strolled through the park, a book in her purse. She could hear children shrieking with laughter, playing tag in the open green spaces, climbing the enormous rocks.

Rory found a bench in the sun by the pond and settled down with Hemingway, sipping her cappuccino and feeling the breeze blow wisps of hair around her face. She was content.

She lost herself in Hemingway, in his masculine disinterest and obsession. War raged and blood was spilled and she clung to the prose because for once she found herself enjoying Ernest rather than merely tolerating him. He was in his own delirious pain, she was beginning to realize, and as he pushed her away he also drew her back in, ever so gently, asking for her to see the parts of him that he pathologically laid bare and concealed and denied.

A familiar laugh pulled her out of her focus. She looked up, startled.

She saw his familiar posture, the easy confidence, the slight swagger, on a bridge over the other side of the pond. His laugh rang out quietly over the water, reverberating. Despite herself, she smiled.

Rory had not seen Logan in years, quite on purpose because it hurt too much and because she knew he didn't want to. She had heard from her grandmother that he too, much like Dean, was settling down. Her grandparents had received a wedding invitation but Rory never looked at it. Her heart ached when she thought about it in that sad, nostalgic, love-lost sort of way that she knew she deserved. But at the same time, the thought of the invitation did not shatter her, did not bring her to her knees with regret or remorse. She had not contacted him in all these years for a reason, she argued to herself at night, alone, and no matter how perfect and imperfect Logan had been, she knew they belonged in separate worlds.

Logan was not alone on the bridge. He was accompanied by a slender blonde, wearing high heels and dark, thin jeans and the perfect jacket and scarf combination for the hesitant spring weather. He played with her hair even as she swatted his hand, amused, her own laugh echoing towards Rory.

Hemingway pulled her back.

 _"Maybe … you'll fall in love with me all over again_."

 _"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"_

 _"Yes. I want to ruin you."_

 _"Good," I said. "That's what I want too."_

When she looked up again Logan and the woman were crossing the bridge, hand in hand, still bantering and playing, bursts of laughter occasionally reaching Rory. She watched them, thinking of Hemingway, lovers ruining each other for mutual benefit. Absently, she wondered what he was doing back in New York, but the question lost itself before it truly formed. He looked happy, among the pink cherry blossoms.

Her phone buzzed.

She pulled it out and did not recognize the number, but immediately recognized the message: _The originality of starting a book tour in NY never fails to delight my publisher. Dinner?_

Smiling again, despite herself, she gave him the poetry of his original muse before her head kicked into gear: _Why darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you._

 _Ernest only has lovely things to say about you_ , he quipped, practiced. _7\. WSQ park._

She slipped her phone back in her purse and watched the retreating figures of Logan and his fiancée. What perfect irony. How clever the universe must have felt, inciting them all with the first day of spring and drawing Rory down boyfriends past. Lovers wanting to ruin each other, minefields hidden in the cherry blossoms and fragrant air of the timid April sunlight.

She opened Hemingway again. He could at least explain himself and his self-destruction before she met up with Jess.

* * *

Rory took the 6 train down to the village, feeling as if it would be both too pretentious and too inappropriate to take a cab. She wore her casual weekend clothes, skinny jeans and a long black slouchy sweater, opting for flat black ankle boots this time. She had felt silly last time she had seen Jess at the diner all done up in her work clothes. But at least here they were in Manhattan, where no one ever looked out of place for what they were wearing, and Rory felt a higher degree of confidence when she climbed up the steps out of the subway and reappeared at Astor place.

It was a quick walk to the park, just a few blocks over Broadway, passing NYU buildings and coffee shops and grungy little counter restaurants. The village was different than uptown, the buildings less tall and the streets less crowded. It was still quintessentially New York – overflowing garbage bags, angry cab drivers, plenty of street food carts to feed the hungry student population – but life moved a half beat slower in this area below 14th street.

Washington Square Park was full, just as Central Park had been earlier. She made her way towards the fountain in the middle, listening to the street musicians that competed for volume. Couples sat cozy on benches, people watching, enjoying the fading warmth of the first true day of spring.

She spotted him sitting on the edge of the fountain, one leg propped up, reading some beat up paperback. His hair was a little shorter than the last time she saw him, still messy and vertical and slightly side swept. He was wearing a well-fitting blazer again and dark jeans, oozing Manhattan style without for a second looking like he tried or wanted to.

Rory perched next to him on the fountain. "Ernest is going to get tired of all of your attention, you know."

Jess's mouth pulled into a half-smirk, his eyes not leaving the page. "Narcissists never tire of attention, Rory."

She pulled _A Farewell to Arms_ out of her purse and slid it over the pages he was reading. "Lucky coincidence?"

Jess closed both books, flipping them together, side-by-side, identical. "I think you missed me."

She laughed, and tugged her book back out of his grip. She didn't miss him. But he was partly correct in that she had read his books, which had pulled her like a magnet towards Hemingway's prose. But he didn't need to know that part.

"So, dinner?" she asked brightly, crossing her legs and looking at him expectantly.

Jess stood, tucked his book in a pocket of his messenger bag, and then reached out a hand to pull her to her feet. "I know a place."

Of course he knew a place. Rory fell into step with him, winding through the flower-lined pathways of the crowded and chattering park. Rory never really went down to the village, always feeling as though the grungy, six-floor walk ups and graffiti-spattered record shops belonged somehow in Jess' territory. It was unnecessary, she knew, since Jess had set up shop in Philadelphia and had clearly become too artistic and cool for such a gentrifying neighborhood. But nevertheless she stuck to other neighborhoods, to other parks. The village, full of colorful reminders of Bob Dylan and Ginsberg and Warhol, was a place that belonged strictly to Jess somewhere in the shadows of her high school memories. He had given her a tour on that fateful day that she had skipped Chilton, and she remembered how much he had enjoyed it, leading a small-town girl through the bohemian memories of a once-artistic Mecca, playing it cool and nonchalant. She wondered how often he returned here.

"It's a little Moroccan place," he told her, "you still like Moroccan?"

"Sounds great," Rory said, honestly. They took a sharp left and Rory found herself once again lost in the nonsensical, narrow diagonal streets and awkward corners of the west village. They were literally "off the grid" here, removed from the safe uniformity of most of Manhattan's carefully planned streets and avenues.

"Straight," he instructed, guiding her through a particularly messy intersection.

After only a few more moments he led her down a short staircase and through a cramped doorway. Rory found herself in a truly tiny, empty restaurant, maybe six little round tables in all, but it was warm and full of soft, muted light and colored, interwoven tapestries. Jess chose the table by the window. He sat on the window seat and let her have the little chair.

Like most first-floor restaurants, this one was set below the street. Rory could see people walking, their knees about even with Jess' head. Outside the city was settling into a calm, blue twilight.

A server brought them menus and Rory scanned everything. It was the perfect mix of clearly authentic and definitely cheap, a college student's dream, the kind of place that her and her mom would have half lived at if it were in Stars Hollow. She noticed a BYOB POLICY sticker on the back of the menu and smiled even more. An ideal Lorelai joint.

"It's perfect," she told him. "Can we get everything?"

He snorted. "Metabolism hasn't slowed down yet?"

"Nope," she grinned, "besides, you've met my mother."

Jess raised his eyebrows, acknowledging her point. Lorelai was forty something and still eating boxes of poptarts in her car like a fifteen-year-old boy, with no discernable weight gain to speak of.

"Although to be fair I think Luke is forcing her to be more healthy," Rory sighed, "last time I was at the house I found actual vegetables in the fridge. Apparently he cooks."

"He owns a diner."

"No I mean real food, not cheeseburgers."

Jess shrugged, "Yeah he's pretty decent."

Rory remembered that, of course, Jess would know a thing or two about living with Luke.

The server reappeared. "Ready to order?"

Jess motioned for Rory to go first. She ordered a tagine with lamb and cous cous, and some kind of lentil soup for an appetizer. Jess was easy. "Make that two."

"Great," she tucked her notepad in her apron.

Before she turned to leave Jess stopped her, and pulled a brown paper bag out of his messenger bag, "Could we have a couple glasses too?"

She nodded, disappeared, and returned within half a second with two slightly tarnished wine glasses and a corkscrew. Jess thanked her, pulled a bottle of red wine out of the paper bag, picked up the corkscrew, and quickly and gracefully uncorked the bottle.

"Wow, look at you," Rory nodded, approvingly, "where'd you learn that?"

Jess took her glass and poured a perfect six ounce pour, and then mimicked the exact amount in his own glass. Then he recorked the bottle and slid it to the side of the table. "You pick up unexpected talents as life goes on," he said, teasing her with her words from Christmas, when she had made him an Old Fashioned.

"This skill of yours was not unexpected," Rory disagreed.

He seemed to appreciate that, his lips tugging into a slightly cocky half smile. "I bartended for a few years, first in California and then in Philly until the bookstore got enough traffic."

Rory wasn't the least bit surprised. She imagined the younger Jess, dark and unforgiving, wearing a black t-shirt and working in some dive bar in Venice beach, breaking hearts and giving zero sympathy to the people who came in to sit quietly at a stool and nurse their hearts in a glass. The scenes from his novels that twisted through sticky, dark booths in the backs of seedy bars, or the scenes overwhelmed by bar fights that spilled out onto the beach, blood mixing with glass and sand, suddenly made a whole lot more sense.

"You were probably a great bartender," Rory smiled, "what drink would you make for me if I came in and slapped the bar?"

"Gin and tonic," he said, without hesitation.

" _Why_?"

His amusement was growing. "Because we both know you're an old soul."

She huffed, but Jess was perfectly right. A gin and tonic for her elderly inner librarian. Delicately, she took a sip of wine and did not give him the satisfaction of a verbal agreement. " _Wine is a grand thing_ ," she quoted Hemingway, giving him a pointed look, "i _t makes you forget all the bad_."

He raised his glass to her, and they clinked together. As Rory sipped her wine she felt a warmth in her body that had little to do with the alcohol and much more to do with the amicable, witty banter that she had – that she had always had – with the dark humored and dark haired man before her. Jess was slouching slightly, confident, playing with the stem of his wine glass and catching her gaze with his amused eyes.

"So tell me, how is Ernest treating you this time around?" he asked.

Rory told him everything, taking the little pieces of Hemingway that she had picked up during this latest read and building her enigmatic Ernest puzzle for Jess. He questioned her assumptions and picked apart her analysis, often agreeing with her impressions and subtly challenging her assertions, weaving a dialogue of literary banter that made her light up with energy. She found herself leaning forward on the table, often forgetting her glass of wine, foot tapping lightly to keep tune with the pace of their conversation. When the food arrived she tasted it ( _delicious_ ) but kept forgetting to enjoy it as Jess threw quotes at her and she dodged the barrage, laughing, arguing for her newfound relationship with Hemingway that she did not want damaged by his ultimate, poetic disciple.

The conversation wove into other literary topics, briefly retouching Woolf and Vonnegut, skimming Bukowski and Austen, alluding to Didion and Pychon. Jess's sarcastic dismissal of Bronte made Rory dissolve into laughter, pleading feebly for her sake but quickly giving up the cause. With _A Farewell to Arms_ tucked in both of their bags, the conversation naturally took up a circular nature, looping back to Hemingway, using pieces of his language in dialogue with other authors and texts.

When the food had disappeared, and Jess poured the last of the wine into the two glasses, Rory fessed up. "I finally read your books."

The wine bottle slipped an inch or so through his fingers, but he set it down calmly. "Oh?"

She nodded, fingers laced together below her chin, eyes on him. He was inscrutable. "You didn't read them before?"

"I read _Subsect_ ," she said, "but you know that, I told you that in Philly. And it was so good Jess. Really. Like nothing I had ever read before."

"You said that," he said, a slight hint of satisfaction appearing momentarily in the otherwise expressionless twist of his mouth. "So what brought on the sudden interest? Hemingway?"

"The other way around actually." Rory took a sip of wine, letting the moment pause and linger. "I'm not sure. I came home from the holidays and your books were all there, stacked on my shelf, and it just finally felt like the right time."

"And?" he waited, expectant.

She realized he was asking what she thought of them. "Oh, Jess, they're brilliant. Obviously. Of course they are. You have a gift. I had read reviews of them at the paper before, but they didn't come close to explaining what you have. They're wonderful."

Jess gave her his slightly crooked half smile. "Thanks."

"I get the bar scenes now," she said, motioning to the wine bottle, "I could see some of Stars Hollow, a lot of New York in them. I get a lot of Hemingway's pain. Alcohol induced anger and sacrifice and longing. Your characters don't get happy endings, do they?"

"Happy endings are overrated," Jess leaned back, more relaxed, "you don't feel anything at the end of a happy ending if you were expecting it all along."

She nodded, "True. And romance – you have so much romance, your characters are all dying for something, but it's so understated and subliminal and repressed. I've never read love stories like yours. And …" she trailed off, suddenly not wanting to say her next bit.

"And what?" he raised his eyebrows.

Rory gave him a copy of his trademark half smirk. "Your sex scenes aren't half bad, Mariano."

He gave a short laugh, crossing his arms, eyes dancing. "You make it sound like I wrote bad Fabio novels."

"No, no," Rory shook her head, feeling the two glasses of wine slowing the rate at which she could gather the words she wanted to say.

Jess did not write anything similar to romance. His characters were tortured, longing, falling to pieces in torrents of emotion and energy. But his characters were also liberated from any kind of PG-13 rating (Jess was never exactly a kid friendly personality to begin with) and the few scenes he had that involved sexual relations of any kind were both passionate, utterly overwhelming, and cold and dark and full of pain. She couldn't quite say how she felt about them so she shrugged and let the topic drop. "You draw from your life experience a lot for these?"

He nodded. "Inevitable, really. 'Write what you know' and all that nonsense. I knew New York, I knew the shitty beachfront underground of Los Angeles, I knew alcohol and I knew anger. I think I've overly tortured my characters to be honest."

"Or yourself," Rory said.

"That too," he spun his wine glass, looking at the swirl of bloodred liquid, pausing. "I'm sorry if it was awkward to read parts of them. I never really knew what you'd make of them, but I couldn't change it. It had to be published as was."

Rory knew he was referring to the tiny moments and snatches of character that she recognized as herself, young and naïve and impressionable. She shrugged. "I only noticed it in the first two, really."

From the way his shoulders moved, just barely, she could tell that he understood that she was alluding to his other muses. "I guess that's about right."

"So tell me," she said lightly, leaning forward again, "who gave you all your other inspiration? Who are the people in the subtext of Jess Mariano's head?"

He snorted. "It's a long list."

"Your dad," Rory began, ticking off her fingers, "you have so few fathers in your books. Luke, I'm assuming, I saw him a few times. Your mom."

Jess nodded, "They had their influence, sure."

"And?"

He drained his glass, and then set it on the table. He looked at her, calm, clearly enjoying the direction of their conversation but in no hurry to speed it along. "Want to find a noisier place to beat out the past troubles of an almost alcoholic author?"

It was getting late, but she had nothing to do the next day except for laundry and editing, and this night was too enjoyable to end. She smiled. "As you wish."

Rory finished her wine as he signaled the server. They split the bill, two adult credit cards side by side in the checkbook. He tipped rather generously, and then led her out into the now chilly New York night, dark and noisy from the Saturday crowds.

"Do you know a place?" she asked.

"I know a street," he replied. After a couple turns and another disastrous excuse for an intersection Rory found herself on a typically narrow west village street full of bars, crowds of people spilling out onto the sidewalk underneath clouds of cigarette smoke.

"Do you have a favorite?" she asked, overwhelmed.

He touched her elbow and guided her through another narrow doorway, maneuvering past groups of chatty young professionals still in their work clothes and college students clearly drinking away their last week of classes. The bar was low-ceilinged and fairly long, each low table illuminated by a shitty tea light candle, extra candles flickering in empty spaces in the walls where missing bricks should be. The music was loud and grungy and Rory couldn't understand half of the lyrics but she liked the bassline.

Every table was full but Rory spotted two tall, empty seats at the end of the bar, next to the wall. She tugged Jess' sleeve and led him over.

They each put their bags under their stools, Rory careful to loop the handle over the toe of her boot, and piled their jackets on the corner of the bar. A bartender approached them in that typical New York way, eyebrows raised, no words of greeting.

Jess leaned forward, elbows on the bar, trying to communicate their drink orders over the music, and then handed the guy his credit card. Rory rolled her eyes. "I got next round!" she said.

Jess handed her a drink, which she smelled and then shot him a look. Gin and tonic.

He was amused. He was holding a short bar glass with a couple inches of dark liquid, whisky something, strong and straight to the point. She sipped her drink, and grudgingly relented to herself that Jess had ordered exactly right, even if he was being obnoxious in the process.

"Where were we?" he asked, swiveling slightly in his stool to face her, one elbow resting on the bar, knees touching hers.

She turned too, legs crossed, leaning in to better hear him over the beating music. She felt braver after splitting the bottle of wine. "I think you were about to give me a rundown on the who's who of your sexual history via your book characters."

Jess snorted, turning away from her in his laughter. Then he took a sip of whiskey and set his glass down on the bar. "You really want the dirty details, Gilmore?"

"If you want to give them," she shrugged. "It's been a while. We're drinking. At what point do we stop pretending that our twenties didn't revolve around sex and literature?"

Jess' smile grew. He tossed her another Hemingway quote. " _I'm not brave anymore darling. I'm all broken. They've broken me._ "

Rory understood the _they_ to be the women in his life, not the 'establishment' or authority or whatever else Jess would have blamed a decade earlier. She raised her eyebrows, challenging him. "Still with the Christmas girlfriend?"

He shook his head. "Ended it before New Years."

"How'd that go?"

"As well as those things go, I guess," he said. She recognized Jess' familiar tendency not to say anything personal that wasn't general or ambiguous.

They were silent for a moment, looking at each other, the music beating, conversations rising into periodic excited shrieks around them. He seemed to be enjoying her curiosity.

"When I went to California I got a bit … reckless," he said, glancing up at her, his tone light, "My first few bartender years were just a series of one offs with girls who came into the bar or girlfriends of people who came into the bar. I'd always get fucked up at work – I think it's part of the job description – and there'd always be _someone_ lingering over a drink, giving me those big doe eyes, twirling a straw and wanting attention. And I could give attention because it was easy and a release and something to do at four in the morning when the beach was dark and I didn't want to go home or drink more or do anything else."

Rory listened, surprised at the deluge of words but not wanting to break the fragile trust he had somehow established, spinning out lyrics of his dark days in the bars of Los Angeles. She could picture it, all of it. Some brown-eyed California beach girl perched on a stool in the early hours of the morning, drawn to the non-communicative dark eyed bartender that offered her sarcasm instead of sympathy. She pictured how easily it would have happened, the girl waiting for him outside, offering up some platitude, Jess locking the door and evaluating her, confident enough to rope her in and in the heat of the moment back her up against the wall, lips hot and demanding, seeking something intense and brief and intimate. Alcohol flavored kisses, sometimes making it up to a half-made bed in a crappy apartment but more often staying right there on the beach, uncaring, wanting.

"I followed the same pattern in Philly for a while," Jess took a sip of his whiskey, looking at the glass rather than at her. "Had one steady girl for a while until her boyfriend figured it out. And then one week the random girl bothering me at the bar came back to continue bothering me at the bar, and I found excuses to bring her home every night, until it became some kind of official and committed."

Rory smiled, "Christmas girlfriend?"

"Yeah," he said. He didn't bother to give her name.

"So you've been around the block," she summarized, teasing.

"A few times," he gave her a half smile, his foot tapping against the stool.

She wasn't surprised. Rory had dated Jess in high school and even then he had been too much, too passionate, too intense for her naïve, innocent high school self. She had assumed that he had been with girls in New York because he had been so _confident_ , wrapping her up in intense kisses, pulling her into his body, lips finding sweet spots on her neck, driving her so crazy that she was all but willing to take his clothes off and press further. She would have too, she knew that, but he disappeared and all of their teenage sexual tension was cut short by the three thousand miles it took to get to California.

"And you, princess?" he grinned, "put the private school uniform to use, ever?"

Rory drained her glass and gave him a knowing look that she knew he would find all too amusing. Without missing a beat he gracefully signaled the bartender for two more, eyes on her, waiting for her to air her own dirty laundry.

"Actually you're going to hate this one," she sighed.

Jess shrugged in agreement. He handed her the new drink.

"I sort of… broke up Dean's marriage to Lindsey," Rory said, looking down, wincing at the stupidity of her younger self. "Right after my freshman year."

 _Right after my freshman year_. She didn't need to give Jess so many details. After all, he had been uniquely, painfully aware of the end of her freshman year, showing up out of the blue at Yale, gesturing at her packed boxes, begging her to come away with him. And it had been too much, too soon, too painful, and she had Dean on her mind because he was safe and harmless, and Jess represented an adult unknown that she was nowhere near ready for.

He didn't seem bothered when she looked back up at him. His half-smile was still there. "The other woman, really?"

She nodded. He raised his glass and clinked hers, grinning. "Didn't think you had that in you."

"I felt terrible about it. We ended so quickly. I found Logan shortly after and settled into a more typical college routine of partying and casual sex and eventually he wanted commitment. It was rocky but good. He proposed to me at graduation and everything."

Jess raised his eyebrows. This surprised him. "The blonde dick that cheated on you wanted to get married?"

Again, there was subtext, and Rory stayed measured, unsure of how he felt about Logan after all these years. After Logan had cheated on her she had run off to use Jess (why did she always feel like she could use Jess?) and Jess had offered himself up to it. Tell Logan anything you want. A dark eyed martyr to her shamelessly selfish cause.

"I said no because of my career," Rory said.

This did not surprise him. "Good."

There was a brief moment of silence. It was not uncomfortable; Rory sipped her drink and let him look at her, analyzing, observant, filling in the empty pieces with his literary imagination.

She realized she still had more to spill. "I dated one of the guys on the campaign for a while, then broke up cause of long distance. I met Rodger through a mutual friend and we were together about a year, living together and everything. I ended it in May because the chemistry fizzled."

"Fizzled?" Jess said, grinning. "I can't say I've ever had that problem."

Of course he didn't. Jess _was_ chemistry.

"Not surprised at your history, Gilmore," he continued. "Committed relationships. Bringing them home to meet the grandparents. Moving in. All the steps."

He wasn't making fun of her but she shot him a look anyways. "Not surprised at you either. Promiscuity and stealing girls from their men. Shameless."

Jess shrugged. He quoted Hemingway again. " _Life isn't hard to manage if you've got nothing to lose_."

The music grew louder. Rory looked at him, at his deep brown eyes, full of curiosity and amusement and the baggage that accompanies years of drinking too much and sleeping around and pouring emotion and anger into literature. She finished her drink. Jess always lived like he had nothing to lose. But he was here, perfectly composed, tossing quotes at her and hiding nothing of his lowbrow behavior. As much as she hated it, she was intrigued by him. How did it feel for him to lose his only other monogamous girlfriend, ending it due to the pressure of commitment and adulthood? Was he still picking up girls at bars, drowning in sex and whiskey because he could?

She had a feeling he wasn't. His eyes weren't wild like they were when he was seventeen. He seemed calm.

"Have you found a new one yet?" he asked.

She took this to mean a new Rodger, a new Dean. A new seriously committed, dewy-eyed guy that couldn't take his eyes off of her and charmed her mother and talked casually about long term future plans.

"No, I've been too busy," she replied honestly. "Work. In fact this is the first weekend in months that I haven't had to go in to the office."

The music grew increasingly louder, the bass vibrating her chair, the conversations growing wild in laughter around them. Jess leaned closer to her for the sake of volume, his voice low. "So now you've taken to picking up ex boyfriends at bars?"

She snorted. "Not for a minute."

His rested his head on his hand, only a few inches away from her, and appraised her, smiling. "More alcohol, then?"

He was teasing her, flirting in that dirty way of his with literary references and dark charisma. She had no idea if he was serious or not but with the alcohol quickly beginning to have an affect on her head, she didn't really care. Jess could flirt with her, and she could flirt back. They had earned that right over the years of growing up and screwing around and screwing up.

The bartender delivered another round and Rory realized she was going to be very drunk. She didn't drink often – she found the whole process fairly unappealing when the dizziness set in – but with Jess only a few inches from her she thought that perhaps drinking was the best idea. Her head was buzzing, and she felt light and brave and confident in the flickering candlelight of the grungy bar. He looked effortlessly cool with whiskey in hand, his blazer showing off the sharp contours of his shoulders and his jawline. He seemed to be highly enjoying himself.

"What was her name?" Rory asked.

He shot her a look, curious. "Steph."

The name lingered in the air and Rory toyed with it, her head light.

He asked her something point blank and dirty and she threw her head back, laughing. They fell into some kind of easy, alcohol-fueled sexual banter, Jess showing just how skilled he was at making her feel like a little girl and Rory doing her best to both shame and surprise him with her answers. The bar became increasingly crowded as the night grew later but Rory and Jess stayed in their little corner, close together, knees touching, ignoring the crowds that stood behind them.

She was very tipsy and she knew it, rocking slightly on her stool, eyes fixed on Jess. He became a little looser, a little less deliberate with his responses, but he maintained his composure and his intelligence. When she stood up to go to the bathroom she placed her hand on his thigh, stepping down from the chair delicately, and then leaned forward and pressed her lips against his cheek. "I'm glad you asked me to dinner, Jess."

She could feel his eyes watching her the entire time she walked away, and when she returned and settled in her seat he continued, his gaze focused, inscrutable, probing.

Another hour or two, another round of drinks, and Rory was lost in the dim, raucous energy of the bar. It was very late. She was very close to Jess, close enough to smell a hint of his cologne and something like aftershave, all very masculine. Were she sober she would have pulled her thoughts together, laid them out chronologically, argued with herself about all the reasons why it would be a terrible idea to continue leading the way down this dangerous path with Jess in a bar. But she was drunk, so she didn't entertain any of those thoughts and felt flirtatious and sexy, pressing his buttons, pushing the limits.

He wasn't exactly pushing her off. He was leaning close to her too, being often witty and occasionally suggestive, making intense eye contact with her, playing with the hem of his sleeve and laughing at her inebriated jokes.

"Do you want to get of here?" she asked, when both their drinks stood empty and the room was spinning.

Jess raised his eyebrows and shrugged. He paid the check, waving off the cash that she pushed at him, and then led her towards the back of the bar, to a narrow side entrance that she had not noticed from the street outside.

He guided her through the door into the chilly night. They were in a little alley that had a sharp left turn that led down a narrow pathway to the street. Jess did not make any moves to head towards the noisy smokers crowded on the other side of the building. No one could see them where they were, in this little, chilled alcove, steps away from the street.

She was unsteady on her feet, rocking back and forth. Comfortably, she slipped an arm around his waist, leaning into his warmth. "Does this feel like home to you?" she asked, gesturing at the crappy village alley, the tall apartment buildings squeezing in, the backdoor of the bar covered in graffiti.

"Yes." He replied. One of his arms wound around her shoulders, keeping her steady, his other hand in his pocket. He was looking down at her.

The strap of her bag slid off her shoulder, and she shrugged it off and let it fall to the ground. He glanced down at it, and then returned his gaze to her.

Her head was spinning. She turned into him, facing him, her other hand finding his waist. She stood on her tip toes and kissed him on the cheek, lingering.

He was breathing rather heavily. "Rory," he said.

She kissed his jaw again, traveling towards his neck, feeling his stubble against her lips. His hand gripped her shoulder hard, even as he remained very still and very steady.

She pulled back, descending back onto her heels. If anything his expression was pained. He was still inscrutable but his eyes had hardened, his breathing slow, his back very straight.

The wine and the gin gave her courage. Last time they were this close he had kissed her, in the bookstore, leaning forward, confident, one hand on her leg, lips sweet and full of promises. This time she felt brave enough.

Rory leaned in, her hand sliding up his blazer, cupping his cheek. She kissed him very softly.

She felt him take a sharp intake of breath, pausing, frozen. His heart beat loudly. But in the tense, brief second she felt no sense of a gamble - Jess was nothing if not capable, if not pure chemistry.

In a whirlwind he had one hand tangled in her hair and one on the small of her back, stepping her backwards up against the wall, his lips hot and demanding and uncompromising. The bricks dug into her back but she pulled him closer, responding to his fervor, yanking his body to mold into hers, wanting to collapse into atoms somewhere between Jess' hard body and the back of the bar.

Jess was neither slow nor forgiving. He dropped his bag to the ground, grabbing her denim-clad leg, pulling it upwards and wrapping it around his body. Rory used this as leverage to coax him closer, feeling the friction, arching her back to press into him. His distant expression, from just moments before, vanished in the heat and the desire that she was so used to seeing on him. His body burned, his lips frantic, hands gripping her waist and the small of her back.

He bit her bottom lip, sucking hard on the pressure point of her neck, swirling his tongue in patterns up towards her ear and making her pant. Then he returned to kissing her, his tongue demanding, his hand cupping the back of her neck, fingers tangled in her hair, pulling, locking her into him.

Rory undid his belt and he exhaled sharply, momentarily releasing her and moving his hands downward to do her the same courtesy, and then using both hands to shove her shoulders back against the wall, fingers gliding down her arms, finding her hands and pinning them above her. He was rough, biting her lip again, adjusting their clothes impatiently.

The music thumped from the bar, and Rory could have heard the chattering crowd of smokers, but when Jess lifted her, wrapping her legs around him, slamming her into the wall, she didn't hear any of it. She felt herself dissolving, kissing him frantically, wishing the wall would hurt more, wondering how in the world she had never once done something so sexual and spontaneous in a grimy alleyway with a guy whose lips demanded more passion than she knew she could give. The gin whispered dirty things somewhere in her swimming thoughts.

It only took moments – years of teenage sexual tension repressed – before she bit his shoulder to keep from screaming and he collapsed against her, allowing her feet to return to the ground, his arms wrapped around her waist, face tilted and buried in her hair, his furious heartbeat drowning out the music.

Delicately, teasingly, she redid both of their belts and then slipped her hands under his shirt, feeling the heat radiating from the small of his back. She turned her head sideways and kissed the top of his head, feeling his breath fluttering against her neck.

Eventually, he put a hand against the brick wall and pushed himself up, his dark eyes searching her, the fire fading. She channeled her own nonchalance, raised an eyebrow, amused.

He led her by hand to the street and they hailed two cabs. He handed her his copy of _A Farewell to Arms_ , switching it for his own. Before she climbed into the cab he squeezed her hand and gave her one last half-smile, half-smirk. "I'll hit you up next time I'm in New York."

She smiled. "See you, Jess."

* * *

The next morning (or afternoon?) she awoke, head pounding, feeling grimy and dirty in a mess of sweaty sheets. She took aspirin and drank water, letting herself lean against the wall in the hot shower. She could feel the bruises on her back aching, but they did not bother her in the slightest.

She did not feel anything wrong about the night before. Sure, perhaps it was charting near idiocy to have an unplanned, very public one night stand with a troublesome ex boyfriend. But she did not feel like the world had opened up and swallowed her whole, or that her heart was made of eggshells, ready to crack at a moment's notice. When she thought of the evening, of teasing Jess, of hanging out at dinner and at the bar, of picking apart Hemingway, she just bit back a smile. Casual sex with an attractive and skillfully experienced guy was nothing Rory could complain about. She had always been physically attracted to Jess.

She didn't expect anything to change. Her and Jess would remain friendish, and if friendish included occasional dinner dates and casual sex, she could think of worse ways to spend her time.

In the evening, when she lay curled in bed, re-reading Jess' copy of Hemingway, she caught the same passage that had stuck out to her in Central Park.

 _Maybe … you'll fall in love with me all over again._

 _Hell, I love you enough right now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?_

 _Yes. I want to ruin you._

 _Good. That's what I want too._

Beside it, Jess had wrote: _And isn't that the goal? Ruining each other for everyone else?_

Her phone buzzed. She picked it up, certain it was her mother.

It was Jess' number. _If you find yourself needing a Hemingway explanation, my publisher has informed me that my phone will in fact work during the book tour._

She grinned, and typed back. _Why darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you._


	4. Summer is for Kerouac and Kindling

**.**

 **Summer is for Kerouac and Kindling**

Summer hit New York in a flurry of pop up restaurants, sunscreened tourists, and warm, beautiful evenings, the parks full and chattering under the broad, leafy trees. Women returned to wearing short summer dresses and big sunglasses, children shrieked as they played on the jungle gyms, freed from the sticky classrooms. The hot dog guys cursed the heat but appreciated the tourists, Midwestern moms taking photos of their matching kids eating true _New York City hot dogs, kids_!

Rory felt an unfamiliar itch, a need to move, to escape the sweltering heat of the city and travel. Her mom's wedding was next week, which would at least allow her the reprieve of Stars Hollow. But she needed something more. Her life had settled into a dull routine of editing, take out, and lonely nights watching movies on her laptop. She needed something to snap the life back into her.

Her office was calm, baking quietly through the doldrums of summer. When she requested a week off for her mom's wedding, her boss hadn't minded at all. "Better than maternity leave, Gilmore," he said, gruffly. She had furrowed her eyebrows at his off-color comment, but took the week without complaint.

She picked up Kerouac because summer in New York always reminded her of Kerouac, of hypothetically jumping on a bus or a train, or in a beat up old car, and heading into the sweet smelling natural landscape that stretched from New Jersey to California. Of course Rory would never do anything so stupid or spontaneous, but she liked living vicariously through Sal Paradise, imagining taking the leap and leaving the crowded, concrete city for some kind of great wide open. She also picked up Kerouac because, like Hemingway, Kerouac always reminded her of Jess. And these days, to her growing surprise, her head was quite full of Jess.

 _The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved_ , _desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars_.

And Rory was beginning to understand what the old beat meant. She left former boyfriends because they had no spark, because they were not mad to live, mad to do anything. But Jess, as she was realizing through their occasional phone calls and texts, was mad for everything he did. He burned constantly, his words challenging her and examining her, his questions alighting sparks somewhere deep in Rory's subconscious. She enjoyed the debates, enjoyed playing with the fire that was Jess Mariano and his literary opinions. And she felt a growing urge to stoke the flames, to continue to banter with him and challenge him, to see how long he could go on burning for until something sapped the oxygen.

She had not heard from him for a while after their night together in the early spring, the night with the Moroccan restaurant and the grungy Village bar and the alleyway that flitted through her memory in gin-scented bits and pieces. But she knew he was busy with the kick off of his book tour. She saw him on the news occasionally, doing talk shows and always looking far too cool to be talking to the overly peppy blonde hosts. Her own paper did a quick bit on him, and a literary review, but Rory hardly skimmed the lines. She was too busy, too swamped with her own work, and besides she did not pine for his attention or want some kind of resolution or understanding. As an adult, she liked to think that she was beginning to understand that sometimes, sex was just sex.

In late April, when she was at a coffee shop reading on a lazy Sunday afternoon, he had called her. She answered, and was genuinely surprised to hear his voice.

The wonderful thing about Jess was that he didn't pretend to attach drama to anything. He had not lowered his voice, meaningfully, to ask if she missed him, or how she was doing, or anything of that sort. Rather, he ignored pleasantries and small talk, or any kind of emotional gravity, and asked for her opinion on a newly released book by an author that they both liked and that Rory was just finishing over a cappuccino. She had laughed at the coincidence.

They fell into easy conversations, every week or so, usually brought on by some book or other. If she saw something interesting in the news she would text him a short byline or question, and he would respond with either a dark, flippant literary quote (Wilde or Orwell or Vonnegut) or a heavily sarcastic opinion. They talked not regularly, but often enough.

In the late Spring he came back into the city twice. The first time, in May, they grabbed coffee during her lunch break and walked around the lower half of Central Park, talking comfortably, proposing different ideas for Luke and Lorelai's respective bachelor and bachelorette parties. Then he had had to run to a formal dinner with his publisher, his agent, and some of the money-makers of the publishing house, and gave her a book and a one-armed hug before disappearing down the stairs to the subway. She had taken the book back to her apartment that evening, ordered Chinese food, and spent a highly enjoyable night eating lo mein, reading the book, and texting him snarky opinions of it while she was sure he was bored out of his mind at the dinner. Later that night, when he was on a train to Boston, he texted her: _Impetuous woman._

The second time he visited, after a few weeks of severely limited communication because she had had to fire one of her assistants and he was busy working events in Chicago, he came to town for an all-day literary event at one of the public libraries in mid-June. He called her, exhausted, at 10pm. "Hey, sorry for the short notice, in the city, you have time for a drink?"

She was already in bed, but it was a Friday night and she didn't have an early morning excuse. She met him at the bar below her apartment. They were both sleepy, Jess looking appropriately socially drained after speaking with strangers all day. Their conversation was slow and languid, relaxed, propelled by the whiskey and gin. After one too many gin and tonics, when she was tired and drunk and too distracted by how long his dark eyelashes were, she tugged Jess up from the bar stool and pulled him up to her apartment, pushing him onto her bed, letting him make short work of her dress and pull her into a hazy, drunken state of sexual bliss. She fell asleep wrapped up with him, her head buried in the crook of his neck, and woke to an empty room and an apologetic note, reeking of Kerouac and a hint of Jess' cologne, scribbled and placed on the pillow next to her: _8am flight. "My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind."_

She smiled, and did not bother to text him because she knew he had an absurd schedule for the next few days. The next time they spoke on the phone they both alluded subtly to their second one-night-stand, but Rory kept the conversation light and Jess seemed to have no need to delve into anything more. They bantered and laughed, making no affirmations, seeking no promises, explicitly avoiding both the future and the past.

Rory began to lightly wonder if maybe drinking and seeing Jess was a bad combination. The alcohol made the chemistry spark too much, made her think dirty things about his sharp jaw line and his smirking lips. She couldn't remember much about their nights together except for how insistent, how demanding his body was, as if he was never close enough even as his hands yanked her waist into him, or cupped her face as he kissed her, deeply, impatient. Jess was not calm or sweet, like her former boyfriends had been. And she could sense, in his ragged breathing and frantic heartbeat, and in the alcohol on both of their lips, that he wasn't thinking about consequences or the future either. In that moment he wanted all of her, demanded everything that she could give, but during the next morning, without the influence of whiskey, he regained his control and the half-smile that created boundaries and distance. When they drank coffee, they wanted each other's minds. When they drank alcohol, they wanted something else.

She had no hopes or plans, no childhood romance fantasies to act out. But she was beginning to come to a few, quiet, subconscious conclusions. She didn't mind that alcohol made them seduce each other. And she didn't mind that she enjoyed their phone calls and texts. They were friends, officially. And sometimes, in dark New York bars under the influence of alcohol, they explored their unspoken benefits.

.

.

In July, a week before she was supposed to go to Stars Hollow for her mother's wedding she walked home from work, enjoying the light breeze and the golden light that filtered through the smog and the leaves of the trees to lay patterns on the sidewalks. She wore a professional, light blue sheath dress and a pair of beige flats, her papers tucked into her beige satchel. Kerouac lay paused in the bottom of her bag, but she could feel his insistence through the handle, his desire to move and travel and leave and love and do all the ridiculous spontaneous things that Rory had spent years purposefully avoiding. She ignored him, passing the food vendors and the storefronts, stepping quickly and purposefully up Fifth Avenue towards her apartment somewhere in the mid sixties.

She felt her phone buzz. "Hello?" she answered.

"I'll believe that you're reading _On the Road_ when I see it," Jess said, dryly.

Rory grinned. She had texted him an innocuous little photo of the cover of the book a few days ago, unsure whether she was trying to surprise or impress him.

"Hit the road, Jack," she said, "summer is always the time for Kerouac."

"Unless you're stuck in Baltimore purgatory signing books and wondering if the owners shut off the air conditioner to try to get you to leave sooner," Jess said, "I think my agent is punishing me by keeping me here."

"Probably, because I'm sure she's quite sick of you by now. Authors are such primadonnas."

"Indeed," Jess sighed, "when are you getting to Stars Hollow?"

"Next Saturday," she replied, "early morning train. My favorite."

"I'll be there after you," he said, "I have an event Sunday. TJ wants me there for 'Monday night madness' which I've gathered involves something with excessive drinking and football. Did you condone that?"

"Yes, consider it a pregame for the Bachelor's party," Rory said cheerfully, "Mom needed Luke out of her hair for a night of bridal prep. You're obligated to cheer for the sports and hand Luke beers when he runs out. I'm told it's a very important best man duty."

"Great. I'll practice my cheering."

"Also beer-opening."

"I think I have that one down," Jess snorted.

Rory waited at the light to cross Fifth and head towards her apartment. "Oh right, former bartender and current functioning alcoholic. I forget."

"Not an alcoholic," Jess disagreed, "just a guy with occasional alcoholic tendencies. For literary flair, of course."

"Of course," Rory crossed the street and walked down one of the quiet, residential streets on the Upper East Side. "Where are you until the wedding?"

Jess sounded tired. "Baltimore until tomorrow, then Atlanta, then a quick stop in DC and then back up to Connecticut."

"Are you filthy rich now after working so hard?"

"You know it," she could hear his half-smile behind his words, "speaking of, I'm off to go make more money. Gotta make sure Luke has all the singles for the Bachelor party."

"Good luck," Rory said, reaching for her keys in her bag, "Make sure you specify 'payment in singles' on your next book advance contract."

"Already done. See you next week, then," he paused, and she could hear noise in the background. "Save a night for me and dinner or drinks in Stars Hollow."

Rory smiled. "I don't think we behave very well with drinks."

Jess was quiet on the other end for a half-beat, and Rory realized she had partially breached their mutual nonchalance. But he recovered seamlessly. "Misbehavior maybe, but misbehavior that I can deal with. Besides, I'm pretty sure you're the root cause of it, not the alcohol. See you next week."

He hung up, chuckling, before she could protest. Rolling her eyes, but smiling all the same, she managed to get her door open and head up to her apartment.

When she changed into her sweatpants and curled up with a book and take-out sushi, she felt that new itch, the urge to shake something up, to startle her predictable, professional life. She loved the coffee and the editing and the containers of greasy food and her neat little apartment. But Kerouac demanded her attention and encouraged her to feel discomfort with her comfort. She glanced at her phone. _It's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies_.

.

.

A week or so later Rory found herself in Stars Hollow in the midst of wedding madness, caught between her mother and her grandmother and a hailstorm of details. Saturday evening was spent dealing with a daisy crisis at the flower shop, and Sunday morning with a panic about Lorelai's wedding dress, which Emily swore had been sized perfectly but was simply not zipping up properly. " _Mom_ ," Lorelai snapped when Emily insinuated that her eating habits had finally caught up with her. Then she ripped a seam and fixed the whole thing herself while Emily called the dressmaker in New York in near hysterics and Rory snacked on chips, watching the whole thing, wide-eyed.

Sunday evening, thankfully, was spent taste-testing Sookie's menu. Even Emily had to struggle to find things at fault, and Rory privately knew that even though her grandmother made a few sneering comments it was only out of habit and not out of actual criticism. Sookie and Jackson's kids ran screaming through the house while the four women snacked on appetizers, gossiping about the fresh Stars Hollow drama. Kirk and Lulu's kid was the star of the upcoming school production of _Hair_ , and Miss Patty's new batch of ballerinas had gotten into three separate fistfights already. Dean was now a co-owner at Doose's.

Monday morning featured a full lay out and walk through of the wedding set up in the town square, and a lot of agonizing over seating charts. "Lorelai, you know you can't just throw people into chaos by not assigning seats," Emily snipped, "people need social _order_ , they appreciate being told what to do."

"Mom, no one here cares who they sit by," Lorelai groaned, pushing the seating chart off the coffee table, "let them have chaos! Let them make new friends. Or new enemies. I don't care. Wedding drama is great."

"Here," Emily picked the bride and groom's table primly, "let's start with your table. This is easy. Me, Rory, Sookie, Jackson, for your side, and then on Luke's side his sister and her awful husband. Is Luke's daughter coming?"

"Yes, add April to the table," Lorelai said, "and Jess, Liz's son. Also the best man."

"Oh right, him," Emily sniffed, "there, your table is perfect. Ten exactly."

"What about the kids?" Rory asked, "Doula and Sookie and Jackson's kids?"

Emily smiled and grabbed another table, "Perfect, Rory, now we'll assign the kids table. Any other young hooligans attending?"

The seating chart charade continued until Emily was satisfied that the Stars Hollow residents would be seated at an appropriate distance from her high society friends that were attending, and ended with Lorelai gleefully assigning Taylor to the kids table. "My wedding gift to Luke," she exclaimed, writing Taylor's name in bold print next to Kirk's odd kid.

The walk through and furniture appraisal lasted until five o'clock, and then the three women trooped into Luke's. The diner was nearly empty, with most of the chairs up and a _closing early_ sign taped to the door in TJ's messy handwriting. Luke stood behind the counter, cleaning off the appliances with a damn rag.

"Honey, look what I did for you!" Lorelai hurried to the counter, showing off the seating chart with her best Vanna White impression.

Luke squinted. "Put TJ at our table? Great. Thanks."

"No, no," Lorelai nudged the kids table, "check it out."

Luke found Taylor's name and broke into a smile. "I knew I was marrying you for a reason."

Rory felt her phone buzz. She glanced down at it.

It was a message from Jess: _Arrived earlier today but I'm already stuck on beer duty at TJ's. If you see Luke, tell him if he doesn't show up in ten minutes I'm gonna kill him._

Rory grinned. She joined her mother at the counter. "Well Luke, I think you'd best get to TJ's, you have important things to do. Sports and beer await you."

"Also TJ," Luke grumbled.

"Hence the beer," Rory pulled her mother's elbow, "stay there until at least 10 Luke, we don't want to see you until all the sports are good and finished. I hear that you are violently missed over there so you should really get going."

"Yes, make sure that all the points are scored and the nice ball boys put the balls away good and proper," Lorelai grinned, "oh, and overtime! Encourage overtime. Call the teams and tell them to do overtime."

"You can't – Lorelai, overtime only happens if the teams are tied, they can't just _do it_ ," said Luke, exasperated.

Rory continued pulling her mom out the door, where Emily waited, tapping her foot. "Nike says they can just do it!" Lorelai called, "Tell them, Luke!"

Luke waved them off, and the three Gilmore women headed back towards Lorelai's house. Rory texted Jess as she walked: _Sent him your way. No guarantee he'll actually get there._

He replied: _You're useless. See you soon?_

She smiled, and gave him Kerouac: _Sure baby, mañana._

His response was lightning quick: _It was always mañana. Later Gilmore, I have some beers to open._

They arrived back at Lorelai's house, and within a few minutes were joined by Sookie. Emily quickly ordered the living room cleared of "all of this _useless_ clutter" and rearranged the furniture to accommodate all of the necessary girls' night bridal prep festivities.

"What's on the agenda, Grandma?" Rory asked, settling on the couch next to Sookie.

"The two girls from my salon will be here any minute for manicures and pedicures – although Lorelai I don't see _why_ we are doing this five days before your wedding, I'm sure you will just chip all the paint between now and then – and then my stylist is going to fix your mother's hair, and anyone else who wants it," Emily glanced briefly at Rory's disheveled ends, "and then of course, the usual, champagne and strawberries."

"The _usual_ ," Sookie repeated, grinning, raising her eyebrows at Lorelai.

Lorelai rolled her eyes and collapsed backwards into an armchair.

Rory was impressed by how quickly her grandmother and her team were able to transform the living room into a passable version of a salon. The friendly, chatty stylists rolled out large plastic mats, to save the rug, and came equipped with foot tubs, mirrors, and all the necessary accessories for an appropriate beauty parlor. Emily was typically snappy and demanding, but within an hour all four women were settled with their feet in warm, bubbly water, gossiping about life and flipping through magazines to make fun of celebrities. Emily was prim as ever, watching like a hawk as the women worked, but occasionally snipped something haughty and rude about whichever celebrity was under discussion.

Rory squirmed as her feet were scrubbed and polished, and picked an appropriately boring and professional taupe color for her nails. Her grandmother approved, but Lorelai snorted. "Come on, Rory, it's a wedding, not a work conference."

"I think it's elegant," Emily said, "well done, Rory, it'll go well with the bridesmaid dress."

"Thanks, Grandma," Rory shot her mother a told-you-so look.

Lorelai picked a shocking fire-engine red in retaliation, to which Emily just sighed. "Everything matches with white, mom," Lorelai reminded her cheerfully.

The time flew by, and Rory was shocked when she checked her watch and it was already nearing 10:00pm. Her mom had received some subtle highlights to bring depth to her dark hair, and Rory had allowed the stylist to snip off her own split ends and sharpen the neat lines of the locks that brushed her shoulders. She refused any kind of dye, and her grandmother harrumphed but allowed it.

The stylists packed up and left with hefty tips (from Lorelai, who apologized a hundred times for Emily forcing them to make a house call) and Emily busily set up the champagne and strawberries and told Lorelai she wasn't allowed to touch anything except the stem of her champagne glass until the paint on her nails had dried for at least two hours.

Rory sipped her champagne, occasionally tossing a forbidden strawberry to her mother when Emily wasn't looking, and listened as the three older women chatted about weddings. Sookie and Emily kept bringing up their own weddings, and Lorelai seemed happy to provide snide comments about Emily's taste and the typical behind the scenes mess ups that happened at Sookie's wedding. Rory, her fingers twisting the stem of her champagne glass, didn't remember much from Sookie's wedding except for utterly losing control of herself and kissing Jess for the first time when she saw him standing by the river bank. Looking back at her incredibly young, teenaged self, she couldn't really blame herself for what had happened. Jess had toyed with her for months, and seeing his dark profile loitering in the sunlight, his hands behind his back, unaffected and casual and absolutely waiting for her, was more than her hormones could take. When she kissed him he reacted so immediately, so expertly, drawing her body into his. She should have known then.

"Rory," her mother repeated, and Rory snapped out of it.

"Yeah?"

"Sookie's leaving, can you help your grandmother go to bed?" Lorelai jerked her head towards Rory's room dramatically, twice.

"Oh yeah, of course," Rory unfolded her legs and placed her empty champagne glass on the coffee table. Emily was already on her way to Rory's room, so Rory waved goodbye to Sookie and then hurried to make sure her grandmother had a glass of water and everything she needed. Emily, clearly exhausted, had the lights off and the door closed within a few minutes.

Rory returned to the living room and found her mother refilling both of their champagne glasses and digging into the remaining strawberries, nails be damned. "Sit, kiddo," Lorelai patted the couch cushion next to her.

"So, did you want the red or was that just to annoy Grandma?" Rory asked, accepting the glass and curling up next to her mom.

"Both," Lorelai flashed a grin, "go big or go home, right? Besides, I've been told it's 'whore-ish' in the past and you know how much I like to make a scene."

"Ah yes," Rory nodded, "you scarlet woman, you."

"That's right," Lorelai held her hand in front of her, examining the nails, "besides, it'll go with your dress too. Blue goes with everything."

"American flag themed," Rory observed.

"Well you know how patriotic me and Luke are. He wanted doves to be released when we finished our vows and I said, no, doves are cliché, but you know what's patriotic? A bald eagle."

"A bald eagle?"

"Yes," Lorelai sipped her champagne, "for America. And for love."

Rory chuckled and felt her phone buzz. She pulled it out of her pocket and checked the screen.

It was Jess: _I like drinking better with young brunettes. Any idea why Luke cursed your mother to hell when the game went into overtime?_

Rory let out a snort. Lorelai leaned over to peer at her phone. "Who ya talking to?"

"Jess," Rory replied thoughtlessly, typing a quick reply.

" _Jess_?" Lorelai repeated, and Rory glanced up. Her mother's eyes were narrowed, the corners of her lips raised behind her champagne glass.

Rory felt the champagne bubbling somewhere where her usual restraint was located. She set down her phone without responding to the man on the other end. "Yeah, you know, the best man."

"Oh right, that one, the tall dark stranger who will be next to Luke at the altar. Pray tell, why is this stranger texting you?" Lorelai popped a strawberry in her mouth and waggled her eyebrows.

"We're friends," Rory shrugged.

"I thought you were friendish?"

"Yeah, friendish. Or friends."

"Since when does he text you?"

"Since he's stuck opening beer for Luke and TJ and watching sports," Rory said. Even to her, as she drank her champagne quicker than usual, the answer sounded hollow.

Lorelai gave her an all too knowing look. "So when did the texting start? Approximately four hours ago when the sports and beer opening started?"

Rory glanced down at her glass of champagne. There was about two inches of liquid left, so she raised her glass and drained it. Then she handed her mother the empty flute and motioned towards the bottle for a refill. "Since he came to New York for a work event and we got dinner a few months ago."

"Aha!" Lorelai quickly obligated and refilled her daughter's glass, "And? Give me the dirty details, sister. You know how much I love details. The dirtier, the better."

Rory remembered the gritty alleyway behind the bar in the West Village, the way Jess's body had instantly pressed into hers like a magnet when their lips touched, they way he had lifted her against the wall and the delicious bruises that lingered on her back for a week. _Dirty_ was certainly a word to describe the details of what happened.

"There may have been some inappropriate activities," Rory accepted the glass back delicately, "but nothing is happening. We talk about books occasionally – no set schedule or anything. I saw him a couple more times in the city."

" _And_?" Lorelai tapped her foot impatiently.

"And nothing," Rory protested, "it's really casual. We're friends."

"With benefits?" Lorelai demanded.

"With very occasional benefits," Rory relented.

Lorelai giggled, draining her own glass and quickly refilling it. "I had a feeling this may happen. Once I heard that he broke up with the moody girlfriend. He kept staring at you at Christmas."

"Did he?" Rory asked, startled.

"Well, no, not overtly, but women have their wily ways," Lorelai grinned, "I could tell. He's very smooth, this adult Jess. But not subtle enough for your mother. Oh no, I am a bloodhound with these things."

"We've only done anything twice," Rory protested, "over the span of _months_. It's more like … we text when new books come out, and a couple times we may have possibly drank too much and ended up doing things that mothers don't like to hear about."

Lorelai shrugged off the qualification. "So is my wedding just another excuse for a drunken hook up?"

"Mom!" Rory exclaimed.

"Kidding," Lorelai said, "but actually, where is this headed?"

"Nowhere, I don't think," Rory said.

"You're not into the broody James Dean ex?"

Rory shrugged, "I don't really know. He's different now."

"He is," Lorelai agreed, "new Jess is much better. Less likely to set fire to buildings. Uses words more often than grunts. Calls Luke before he leaves or shows up out of the blue."

"Yeah, he's definitely grown up," Rory nodded.

Lorelai analyzed her daughter, her expression thoughtful. "You know, you can use my wedding as an irresponsible hook up excuse, I really don't mind."

" _Mom_."

Lorelai raised her hands in self-defense, "I'm just saying, he's not the worst moody hipster I've ever met, I actually enjoy having him around, for Luke's sake, and I always imagined you ending up with someone who was an equal book worm. The man is a famous author now, for goodness sake. You guys can grow old and become librarians together."

"Mom, we're not dating!"

"Okay, but _if_ , all I'm saying is that you'll have to invest in a lot of sturdy bookshelves and bedside reading lamps. You have to think about the logistics, sweetheart. Do you _want_ that many bookshelves? Can your apartment's interior design energy handle more literary clutter? What if your kids like reading too? Can the structure of the house support that much paper weight? Isn't it a fire hazard to have that much paper in one place?"

Rory ate a strawberry, silent, her thoughts processing her mother's unsolicited approval. She felt her phone buzz again, and glanced at Jess's message: _Out of beer and out of sports. Tell Lorelai to expect him home soon_.

"Drunk Luke is incoming," Rory announced, cutting off her mother's rambling.

Lorelai sighed, "Better clear the pathway from the door to bed."

As Rory cleared the table, her mother got in one last comment. "He was the only boyfriend that you never gave a proper ending to, sweets. Sometimes it's nice to find out where the story leads."

Before Rory could respond there was a heavy knock on the door, and Lorelai hurried to help a gruff, stumbling Luke up the stairs.

Rory typed back to Jess: _Cargo safely arrived._

But behind her casual text to Jess and her exasperated response to her mother, Kerouac's truths floated through her bubbly thoughts. _We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends._

 _._

 _._

The next few days passed in a whirl of last minute wedding preparations. Rory helped Sookie grocery shop and Emily oversee flower vase bow tying, and made sure to grab coffee for her and Lorelai from Luke's at least four times a day. She ran into Jess more than a few times, each of them always busily doing something for the wedding. He would shoot her a knowing look, his dark eyes twinkling, as they ran into each other in the café, or crossed paths in the sunny town square holding various parcels and packages for the wedding event.

Once, when she hurried to Luke's for an emergency coffee run as Emily and Lorelai bickered at home over the "absolutely hideous" vintage shoes Lorelai was planning on wearing for the ceremony, Rory saw his familiar, slender frame by the gazebo. He was with Doula, who had her hair in pigtails and was trying to hoola hoop. Jess, laughing, kept catching the hoop before it fell to the ground and spinning it around her once again, as she raised her arms and tried to figure out how to make her hips find rhythm. Rory paused, charmed, observing a carefree, younger side of him that she rarely saw. Doula, though clearly frustrated, still let out peals of laughter as Jess encouraged her on.

Jess noticed Rory, and winked. She smiled back, distracted, and then forced herself to turn and go to Luke's. Lorelai's caffeine boost couldn't wait when she was fighting with Emily.

Thursday was the day of the fateful bachelor and bachelorette parties, and Rory felt only slightly nervous that her event wouldn't go as planned. However, with Miss Patty and Babette's help, she was sure that the event would be appropriately raunchy for her mother. They set up in Miss Patty's dance studio, and Rory blushed at some of the posters that the two older women shamelessly tacked onto the walls. Miss Patty regaled them with tales of her many bachelorette parties as they filled the coolers with ice, set up various naughty games (pin the tail on the _what_?) and arranged chairs for optimal girl talk and (though Rory flinched) the stripper that she had built up the courage and called and booked.

Rory had assurance from Jess that the boys were heading to New Haven, so she did not feel too exposed having the event in such a central Stars Hollow location. "No, I'm just taking them to a perfectly normal strip club and sports bar and putting the tab on my card," Jess had rolled his eyes, "I am not planning or hosting anything."

Unfortunately, Rory didn't have that luxury, and she closed the door to the studio quickly behind her when she left to retrieve her mom. Lane and Sookie were approaching together, holding cardboard boxes of pizza. Sookie looked thoroughly unhappy to be holding the offending fast food items.

"Thanks for picking up the pizza," Rory said, relieved to see both of them, "I'm going to grab my mom – Babette can show you were to put that."

"Oh heavens," Sookie exclaimed when the door opened. Lane burst out in giggles. Rory shook her head and hurried away.

The men were congregating at Lorelai's house, but Rory, already feeling jumpy and exposed, started when she saw Jess on the front porch, pointedly ignoring TJ. Luke was begging Lorelai to let him stay home and watch football.

"Oh no," TJ said, "no, no, you will not ruin our fun, no sir. Get in the car!"

"Having fun yet?" Rory asked Jess quietly, sidling up next to him.

"Oh yeah, loads," Jess said sarcastically, his arms folded, "once I get some whiskey in him he'll be fine."

"I may need some of that," Rory said weakly. When he glanced at her, she elaborated. "Babette and Miss Patty have made the dance studio x-rated."

Jess smirked, "Delightful."

TJ finally dragged Luke towards the truck, and Jess gently squeezed her hip and moved past her towards the car, keys jangling. She jumped again, as if burned by the friendly contact.

"Is it just the three of you?" Lorelai yelled after them, "lame bachelor's party!"

The car disappeared, and Lorelai looked Rory up and down. "Really, you're wearing that?"

"What's wrong with this?" Rory asked, surprised. She looked down at her skinny jeans and black tank top.

"Where is your boa? And the sparkles? And the pink? Haven't you ever seen a proper hen's party?"

Rory sighed, "All accessories are currently on location. I was going to change into fancier shoes, will that satisfy you?"

Lorelai clapped, "Oh yes!"

Rory switched her sneakers for a pair of tall red heels (in honor of her scarlet mother) and then turned off the lights, closed the front door, and walked her mother towards the dance studio. Lorelai babbled the whole time, overly-excited, guessing at the various naughty things that would happen at the party. By the time they arrived, Rory was almost relieved that Babette and Miss Patty had helped her inner naive Chilton schoolgirl adultify the event.

"It's perfect!" Lorelai cried when the door opened.

The women inside gave a cheer. "Lorelai!"

Rory saw what seemed to be the entire adult female population of Stars Hollow sipping on Babette's famous pink cosmos and chattering around the studio. She made a beeline for Lane, accepted the bright pink drink her best friend handed her, and tried not to look at the graphic image on the wall next to them.

"They outdid themselves," Lane said, nodding in appreciation at the space, "and I am so grateful you told me to tell my mother that there would be no vegan food here."

"Yes, Mrs. Kim would not have handled this well," Rory said fervently.

"What about your grandmother? Is she coming?"

"She was invited," Rory tipped her shoulders, cringing at the idea of Emily walking into the space, "but my hope is that she uses tonight to fix everything about the wedding that she believes my mom has neglected. She'd be so much happier doing that."

To Rory's great relief, Emily did not decide to attend the bachelorette party. As the night went on, she wasn't sure what image would be the most traumatizing for her: Gypsy successfully pinning the tail, the young firefighter stripper treating Lorelai to some brief fun and then being monopolized by Miss Patty, or the raucous game of truth or dare that developed near the cake. At one point she texted Jess a helpless _S.O.S._ , but he didn't respond and she assumed he had his hands full with the older men in his charge. She knew Jess was the designated driver for the group, so undoubtedly he was helping to coax them into all sorts of bad decisions.

Eventually, as the night wore very late, the women began to head home. Lane and Sookie used their kids as excuses to avoid one last cosmo, and left at the same time as the stripper, who Rory tipped and apologized to profusely on behalf of Miss Patty.

Rory was unsurprised to find her mother sufficiently inebriated by the time the last women waved goodbye and left. Morey showed up out of nowhere to help Babette home, and Miss Patty waved off all assistance and went off humming into the warm summer evening.

"Wow kiddo, can you believe this night!" Lorelai laughed, unsteady as she slid to sit on the front steps of Miss Patty's dance studio, carefully balancing her cosmo, "did you _see_ Babette do that dare?"

Amused, Rory perched next to her mother. "Yes, yes I did. Never forget."

"And Miss Patty! Oh that poor sweet clueless stripper. You don't think we have a lawsuit coming there do you?"

Rory shook her head, "No, he's fine. Probably will never come back to Stars Hollow. Ever. But he's fine."

Lorelai threw her head back, laughing. Rory steadied the drink in her hand, breaking into a smile at her mother's utterly carefree, happy state of mind.

"Mom it's after midnight," Rory checked her watch, "you're officially getting married tomorrow. How does that feel?"

"Like it's about damn time," Lorelai sloshed her drink, "been waiting for that man for .. for years. And _years_."

"Yeah," Rory smiled, watching her, "I think he has been too."

"I'm glad at least I got married before you," Lorelai sighed, "boy, Emily never would have let that one go. Thanks for waiting, child of mine."

"No marriage in sight," Rory promised.

"If you elope to Vegas tomorrow with that stripper I will be annoyed with you," Lorelai warned tipsily.

"Noted."

A car pulled to the light, and then drove around the square towards them. The headlights flashed on the steps and Lorelai covered her eyes, spilling her drink slightly in the process. Rory recognized Jess' car.

"It's Luke!" Lorelai grinned, standing, her pink feather boa off-kilter around her shoulders. "Luke!" she called.

The car's headlights went dark and the two men climbed out. Luke, like Lorelai, seemed slightly more unsteady than usual, and Jess was quick to grab his arm before he tripped getting out of the car.

"Did you lose TJ?" Rory asked, perplexed.

"Yes," Luke grunted.

"No," Jess corrected, "just dropped him off at home first."

Lorelai tripped going down the stairs, but regained her footing and fell into Luke, giggling. "You will not _believe_ what happened in Miss Patty's tonight."

"I don't think I want to know," Luke said, his eyebrows raised, taking in his fiancée's boa and the glitter dust in her hair.

"How is he?" Rory mouthed to Jess. He gave an unconvincing thumbs up.

Within minutes though, Rory could tell that Luke was significantly more sober than Lorelai and was at least able to keep both of them upright and talking. He had a sensible looking water bottle sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans, and had the good sense to tip out Lorelai's drink when she wasn't paying attention.

"Hey Luke, think you can get her home?" Rory asked, "I gotta clean up this mess."

"I can help," Jess offered, quickly.

"Yeah, I got her," Luke put his arm around Lorelai's shoulders, shooting Jess a look, "come on, Lor, let's go."

"But Luke! You know what right now calls for? Pancakes. Pancakes and coffee. Irish coffee. Can we have both?"

"Yeah, yeah, of course," Luke steered her towards her house, waving back at Jess and Rory, "at home, let's go."

Rory watched as Luke escorted her mother out of the square, and then turned to look at Jess. He was smirking, eying the confetti that had spilled from the studio, down the stairs, and was already making its way into the lawn.

The night was warm, and Rory was suddenly aware of how quiet the town was after midnight. The crickets chirped somewhere in the grass, and the night felt full and velvety and sweet. The street lamps would shut off soon, she knew.

"So. Clean up?" Jess asked, his hands in his pockets.

She glanced at the dance studio, thinking of the sticky, confetti-covered mess within, and then sighed. "In a minute?"

Jess smiled. He went up the steps quickly, shut off the lights, and closed the door behind him. "Procrastinate until the morning?"

She realized how tired she was. "Maybe," she admitted.

He stepped down, eyeing her. His dark eyes swept her bare shoulders, her jeans, and then reached her risqué choice of heels. "No boa?" he teased.

"Lost it in the haze of the night," she said, dryly.

"I like the look," he gave her that knowing half-smile, "very city chic, Gilmore. If you tap those three times I think you'd have the option to go to Kansas."

"Ha," she placed a hand on his shoulder to balance and removed her right heel, and then the left. When she stepped down he suddenly seemed much taller.

"Walk with me?" he suggested.

Although she was barefoot, and it was after midnight, and she felt exhausted after the busy bachelorette party, she said, "Sure," before any of those reasons sparked an objection on her tongue. Kerouac whispered spontaneity somewhere in her bloodstream.

Jess walked slowly, allowing her time to pay careful attention to where she stepped. It was a beautiful night, with bright stars and a three-quarter moon that helped to illuminate her way. She avoided pebbles, preferring the soft grass in the square, and let him lead on this midnight walk. Kerouac, the master of starry nights and open-ended evenings, would have loved this night, full of flexible uncertainties.

She wasn't surprised when they ended up at the bridge, because it was peaceful and beautiful and, in her hazy teenage memories, a place she always associated with Jess. The dark water rippled silver in the moonlight, and the crickets were even louder. Jess settled on the wooden boards, his shoes dangling over the edge, leaning back on his hands, effortless. She joined him somewhat less gracefully.

"So how many dances did TJ get?" she began, conversational.

Jess snorted, "Too many."

Rory smiled, "Miss Patty monopolized our guy."

"Can't say I'm surprised."

"And you? How many did you get?" she asked, partly teasing, partly challenging.

He shot her an unamused look, and did not answer.

They lapsed into quiet, Rory comfortable in the warm night, listening to the cacophonous symphony of the nighttime insects. Jess stared at the water, occasionally touching the surface with the toe of his sneaker to make the ripples dance.

"So do you have a date for the wedding?" Rory ventured, after a while. She could feel herself pushing the limits of their mutual nonchalance, but she was not afraid of offending him. She felt brave, on the same bridge where, in the early dawn of their first relationship, she had demanded him to refute Dean's allegations of their mutual connection. In that moment, as she hated herself for being a terrible girlfriend to Dean, she felt no shame in forcing Jess to acknowledge the part he played, and the emotions that drove him. If she was going to go down with that ship, Jess was damn well going to go with her.

Here, she felt that same sense of shameless courage. Maybe she was pushing boundaries, but she felt safe in their complicit game. Or, maybe the only cosmo she had drank five hours ago was stronger than Babette had promised.

He shot her another look. "No. You?"

"No," she shook her head.

She began to feel acutely aware of the tension between them. The casual manner that they had cultivated so carefully over phone and text seemed stretched, thin, in the heavy summer night air. She could feel herself forcing the friction, but could not come up with an adequate reason why. Kerouac, a whirl of energy and passion and indecision, would not have needed an adequate reason. He would have pushed, demanding the world to bare their souls, to _connect_ , to feel the energy of the night and embrace it in a howl of alcoholism and reckless behavior. Rory wasn't reckless, or drunk, but she could hear the howl in the distance and she didn't feel like running.

"You alright?" she asked, after another tense, quiet, lingering moment.

He gave her a raspy rendition of Kerouac. " _I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you_."

"What stars are you caught between?"

He flashed his half smile, "Ideals, I suppose."

"Such as?"

He appraised her. "Independence. Freedom. Mobility. One night stands that leave me aching the next day."

Her breath caught, but she stayed steady, her eyes locked on his. She imagined the delicate gray twilight of their mutual nonchalance shot through with a beam of sunlight. The tension recoiled, thrown into the light, made visible and obvious.

She realized, abruptly, that this was the first time that the tension was unbearable without the influence of alcohol. They were both sober, grounded on the bridge, able to see the stars above them and hear the crickets and process language without the alcohol haze of bias or fantasy. His eyes were inscrutable as he watched her for a reaction.

"We're breaking this," she said.

He nodded.

The tension was pulsing now. Rory's thoughts flitted to Manhattan, to her little, white apartment uptown, to the office that acted more like her second home in midtown, to the careful, lonely life of take out Chinese food and movie marathons that she had created. She thought of her independence, of her free weekends and evenings, of all of the time that she had that was accountable to no one but herself. She thought of the isolation that sometimes suffocated her, the way that a phone vibration could snap the loneliness to pieces.

There was a crease in Jess' shoulders now, taking away some of his carefree affect. His eyes were very serious, examining her face, waiting, patient.

"Why didn't it work, when were kids?" she asked absentmindedly.

He shrugged. "Bad timing. Immaturity. By the time I had figured out that I was really ready for you, you were off making bad decisions of your own. I think we needed to lose each other on purpose for a while."

She remembered him at her Yale dorm years ago, breathless, a vision of Kerouac in a leather jacket asking her to come away with him. She had seen him standing there, offering his heart, offering his recklessness, but her focus was on another ex boyfriend and a marriage that wasn't hers to ruin. She ruined it anyway, ruined everything, sent Jess off into the night and shattered Dean's home life.

If Rory was honest with herself, _she_ was the root cause of most of the bad timing and immaturity after Jess' ill timed, badly communicated teenage runaway trip to California. She let Logan humiliate Jess when he was clearly getting his life together and being successful, and embarrassed herself when Jess forced her to see what a mindless wasp she had become. The last time, when she went to Philly seeking retribution for Logan's betrayal, Jess had seen through her entire charade. He had offered her his sacrifice, even as she incoherently babbled about Logan and revealed how truly childish and selfish her thinking was. Rory cringed just thinking about it.

"I think we needed to lose each other on purpose for a while too," Rory agreed, slowly. "I needed to grow up."

"We both needed to grow up," Jess amended.

Rory looked at him, helpless, "Yeah, but I treated you terribly Jess. I am really sorry."

He shrugged, "I've been through worse. Didn't treat you well, either"

They fell quiet again. The tension had a streak of ugliness now, a hint of a reminder of the ways they had cruelly mistreated each other when they were young and in love and selfish. Rory felt uncomfortable with this breach. Her head spun. Perhaps this would have been easier in a rowdy bar with background noise and alcohol to fill the heavy silences. Here, on the quiet bridge, they were utterly bare to one another. His eyes never left her.

He murmured Kerouac, as if offering an olive branch, " _Most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by._ "

"It would be, wouldn't it?" Rory said idly. She could not really imagine saying goodbye to Jess now, ending the fragile alliance of texts and phone calls that she felt had inextricably wrapped to the cords of her emotions.

The night swelled around them, warm and humid, the noises of the crickets drowning out Rory's scattered thoughts. Jess returned his gaze to the ripples in the water. Both of them were stuck in their own thoughts, pulsing the tension, existing side by side in comfortable discomfort.

Eventually, when she was sure it was very late, he stood and offered her his hand. "Walk you home?"

She accepted, and he pulled her up. She felt the loss when he let go of her hand, but made no motion to recapture it. She felt as if they were on no-man's land right now, their easy mutual nonchalance broken into pieces but a new common ground formed under them. They could be aware of the tension, and not yet do a thing about it.

They moved quietly through the dark town, eventually reaching Lorelai's house. He came to a stop. "See you tomorrow?"

"Sure baby, mañana," she replied, half joking, her voice unsteady.

He smiled briefly, appreciating Kerouac's ways. They stared at each for a moment.

Jess leaned forward, brushing her hair behind her ear and kissing her lightly on the cheek. Then he stepped back, hands in his pockets, offering a crooked smile. "Beat it."

She lingered for a moment, the tension pulling her, but then smiled back and turned towards her house. The screen door creaked, and when she turned around Jess had already disappeared into the night.

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The day of the wedding dawned warm and sunny, a typical Stars Hollow July day that smelled like the fresh, grassy green of summer. By 10:00am Rory and Lorelai together had already polished off a box of poptarts and two pots of coffee, and were starting the third when Emily arrived to whip the bride and bridesmaids into shape.

Rory had not seen Jess the day before, and she felt a nervous tingling in her stomach that she was sure had nothing to do with her mother's upcoming nuptials. When her thoughts strayed towards Jess she tended to snap herself out of it, thinking of the mountain of work emails that were surely waiting on her laptop, or the editorial that she was supposed to be writing on the new foreign policy plan just put forth by the State Department and supported by the UN. She could feel the mutual tension stretching from Luke's upstairs apartment all the way to her house, but she felt a sense of serenity about it. Although Jess had let her see a flashing glimpse of his feelings towards their affair, she could sense his calm patience, his hesitance. Like Rory, he seemed unwilling to break their friendship so quickly. _We're breaking this_ , she had said, but that didn't have to mean _right here, right now_.

She wrapped her fingers around the mug of coffee, willing the caffeine to solve the two sleepless nights that she had had since their midnight conversation on the bridge. Her yawns came frequently, even as her mother tapped her fingers on the table, counting down to Emily's arrival like the countdown to doomsday.

The front door opened with a bang. "Girls, my god, have you even showered yet?" Emily demanded, appearing in the kitchen.

Lorelai and Rory exchanged looks. "Uh, getting right on that Mom," Lorelai said weakly.

"Well hurry!" Emily exclaimed, "The ceremony is in six hours, what do you think this is, some kind of common garden party? Get moving! Lorelai, we're running out of time to do your hair and make up."

"Hair and make up does not take six hours," Lorelai groaned. She poured herself a cup of coffee and stomped up the stairs.

Emily raised her eyebrows at Rory, "You too. It's going to take half an hour at least to get those bags out from under your eyes."

Rory examined her reflection in the back of a spoon. Her grandmother was right. She looked close to death, pale and drawn and ghostly. Sighing heavily, she followed her mother's suit, refilled her coffee, and prayed that a hot shower would wake her up.

The wedding preparation felt like being caught in the crosswinds of a hurricane. By the time Rory was dried off and wearing a neutral pair of sweats and a t-shirt, Lorelai and Emily were already yelling at each other over the sound of a hair dryer. Emily had brought her stylist again to do their hair and make up, and it became immediately evident to Rory that her mother and grandmother would not agree on a single aspect of any of it. On this one, Rory sided with her mom. It was her wedding day. So she did her best to distract Emily, asking her grandmother to help her pick out jewelry to go with the short, simple navy blue bridesmaid dress.

"You and Sookie should match," Emily said, decisively. "Call her and tell her to wear gold, not silver."

"I think she's a bit busy with the catering, Grandma," Rory replied.

"Well heavens, she shouldn't be a bridesmaid _and_ a caterer," Emily snapped. Rory grinned, and then caught her grandmother's attention again to ask for help with shoes.

In the late afternoon, when the light was starting to become golden and beautiful, Rory hurried to the town square to help with the very last second preparations. Liz, Babette, and Patty had done a beautiful job. Simple white chairs were lined up facing the archway that Luke had constructed, which was laden with daisies. Flower petals lined the walkway. It wasn't fussy or overdone, exactly what Lorelai and Luke wanted. Already, half the town was milling about, saving seats and getting ready for the ceremony to start. Everyone was dressed in their best, or in their wackiest, and Rory's heart felt full seeing the community that had helped her and her mom through so much.

"Oh Rory, sweetheart, you look beautiful!" Miss Patty exclaimed, reaching forward to grab Rory's hand.

"Thanks, Miss Patty," Rory smiled. The dress was simple, and Emily had chosen a pair of nude pumps and some delicate gold jewelry to round it off. Her hair was pulled back into a loose knot, with a single flower tucked into the mess. Unfortunately they hadn't been able to solve the bags under her eyes. She knew she still looked tired and far too pale for this late in the summer. She blamed her Manhattan office and the window that faced in a direction that the sun never seemed to shine.

"We'll start in fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes people," Taylor announced, using his megaphone, "Has anyone seen the happy couple?"

"I'll go get Mom," Rory called. Taylor waved her on, and quickly returned to barking reminders into the megaphone.

Rory collected the bridal bouquet from Liz, made sure to find Sookie and check that she was dressed and ready to duck away from the kitchen for the ceremony, and then asked Babette and Miss Patty to make sure everyone started finding the seats, and that someone wrestle the megaphone away from Taylor and hide it or Luke might end up committing murder on his wedding day.

When she returned to the house, Emily and Lorelai were preparing to step into the carriage. Rory smiled when she saw both women, both radiant. Lorelai's impromptu tailor job on the dress was impeccable. The dress fit like a glove. Emily was perfectly proper in a suit jacket and skirt and a matching hat pinned to her hair.

"How matronly do I look?" Lorelai swished her dress, her eyes dancing.

Rory handed her the bouquet of flowers. "Younger than me. With better fashion sense."

"Princess Buttercup would have been an adequate response too, but I'll take it," Lorelai checked her nail polish with the flowers, "See mom, told you it would match."

Emily sighed, and stepped daintily into the carriage.

Although Rory could not quite believe it was already the hour, the carriage jolted to life and they made their way to the town square, the horse clip-clopping through the beautiful, late afternoon summer light. When they pulled towards the square, Rory saw the whole town seated, all eyes expectantly turned toward the carriage. She could see Luke and Jess standing near the altar, and Sookie standing near the aisle, behind the chairs, waiting for the bridal party with a beaming smile on her face. Emily harrumphed, "There is _flour_ on Sookie's dress."

"Shh, Mom, look at how amazing it looks," Lorelai beamed at the square, moving her hand to rest on Emily's.

The troubadour began playing something mellow and pretty on his acoustic guitar, and Rory leaned forward and kissed her mom on the cheek. "Love you, Mom. Knock 'em dead."

Lorelai cupped Rory's cheek, her eyes full, and then helped her open the door to step out. Rory waved at Sookie, and smiled at the blur of faces turned towards her. Carefully, as Emily had instructed her, she began walking up the aisle, her hands clutching a small bouquet of flowers.

At the far end, Luke stood looking calm and handsome in his best suit. Rory gave him a big grin as she neared the altar, and he returned it, nodding to her. Then, without meaning to, her eyes slid to his right.

Jess smirked at her, looking remarkably young and dark and handsome in his suit. His hair was a typical dark mess, and his posture was relaxed. He kept his eyes on her, unabashed, letting his gaze sweep her figure as she walked to stand on the left side of the arch. When she reached her position she couldn't help but glance at him sideways, and nearly blushed when she caught him toss her another crooked smile.

Sookie and TJ walked up the aisle next, both of them already nearly crying. When Sookie reached Rory she clasped her arm, shaking her head with emotion. Rory saw a handkerchief already crumpled up in one of her fists.

And then, the troubadour changed the melody slightly, and Lorelai, a vision in white, began walking up the aisle, holding arms with Emily.

Rory felt a deep, panging sadness, as the gaping emptiness left behind by her grandfather hit her all at once. But Emily, the picture of strength, walked her daughter firmly up the aisle, patted Luke on the arm, and then took her seat in the front row, back straight and legs neatly crossed.

The ceremony was quick, and Rory found herself fighting back tears next to Sookie by the end of it. When Luke and Lorelai exchanged rings and sealed the deal with a kiss the town exuberantly stood up, clapping and cheering, congratulating the happy couple. The troubadour changed the tune to something jauntier, and the neat order of the ceremony quickly dissolved into an unorganized mess of happy tears and congratulations and photographs. Sookie squeezed Rory's elbow, and then disappeared back to her house to finish the food and set up the outdoor catering. Lane came up to Rory with her twins and gave her a big hug.

Rory stood still for a moment, watching the town envelop Luke and Lorelai, feeling a great tenderness for the whole community. Then Emily caught her attention, and she snapped back into action, helping her grandmother and some townspeople rearrange the chairs, clear the dance floor, set up tables, and get the reception party started.

Evening settled slowly over the party as the sky turned shades of purples and blues, and strings of lights twinkled over the reception. Rory gave a toast that ended in her mother laugh-crying, and Jess gave a toast that made Luke pull him in for a gruff hug. Sookie's food was delicious but Rory hardly tasted any of it, enjoying the warm evening and the noisy conversations and the bubbly feeling of optimism that seemed to rise from the champagne glasses and infuse the flower-scented summer night air.

Eventually, the dance floor became crowded with couples enjoying Lorelai's eccentric playlist. Rory sat with her grandmother, tapping her foot, watching Luke beam as he danced with Lorelai.

"Your mother looks exceptionally happy," Emily observed.

"Yeah," Rory agreed, feeling warm and content, "she really does."

Night fell, the cake was cut, and the songs began to quiet to slow, romantic, drowsy melodies, couples revolving together under the lights. Rory stood near the edge of the dance floor, watching her mother and Luke sway to a slower Bangles song. She felt a hand on her shoulder. "Care to dance?"

She glanced back and saw Jess, his usual smirk playing across his lips. "If we must," Rory said, sharing his smile and accepting his hand, guiding him further from the chatter of the guests. They ended up in a corner of the dance floor, next to a tree lit up by twinkle lights, just far enough from the rest of the couples.

Carefully, he drew her towards him and rested both his hands on her waist. Feeling bold again, she moved even closer and placed her arms around his neck, their eyes only inches apart. If Jess was surprised by her forward move he didn't show it, and matched her gaze evenly, his dark eyes appraising her.

"You look nice," he said.

"So do you," she said, honestly.

They revolved a few times, gently, and then he quoted Kerouac. " _It was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing_."

"I'm not sure either of us are particularly heavengoing," she remarked, smiling.

"And I'm not drinking wine," he added.

"I don't plan on spitting," she warned.

"But it is a fine night," he smiled.

"It is," she agreed, shifting even closer, laying her head against his chest and hearing his heartbeat. She saw the other couples swaying, but she blurred her vision, letting herself feel as if they were the only ones on the floor.

 _We're breaking this_ , she had said, and in this moment, holding Jess close to her, she could feel the tension cracking around them, pieces falling away.

"We're breaking this," he said, quietly, almost like a reminder.

She raised her head, meeting his intense eyes, watching his face for any sign of a change. Jess was calm, measured. She nodded, "I know."

"I don't want this to end again," he said almost off-handedly, but his gaze was fixed, focused on her. "Not sure my bitter alcoholic heart could take it."

"Not even for literary purposes?" she asked, teasingly.

"Only for literary purposes," he half-smiled.

Rory evaluated him, the lights glittering behind him as they revolved. He looked softer in the warm light, and she felt that same sense of complicit courage. "I don't want it to either."

Jess looked at her briefly, and then raised his hand to cup her cheek. He drew her in for a slow kiss, one hand on her waist, one hand tangling into her hair. She pulled him closer, reciprocating, feeling his smooth lips and the sharp stubble of his five o'clock shadow.

He rested his forehead on hers, and then pulled her back, resuming swaying, as if nothing had changed, nothing had just shattered into bits around them. Their façade of friendship, built with texts and phone calls and careful light tones, crumbled in an instant. Rory felt like _his girl_ , in this fine, moony, heavengoing night. She held him tighter, for an instant, and he kissed the top of her head, continuing their slow, steady revolution.

When the wedding began wrapping up Rory saw her mom and Luke off, promised her mom that she would be fine sleeping at Lane's, and helped everyone cheer and throw petals as the newlyweds departed. Jess stood behind her, his hand catching hers, fingers entwining in the dark.

The festivities continued, even after half the guests had departed. Rory waited until Lane left, and made sure to catch Jackson and Sookie before they went home. When the party disintegrated into sloppy dancing and tight circles of people, intensely wrapped in conversation, she found Jess and took his hand. They slipped away, back to Luke's, locking the door and heading up the stairs to an apartment that was now exclusively, and rarely, inhabited by Jess. She curled up on the bed, watching him undo his tie and drape his jacket over the back of a chair. He offered her a t-shirt but she shook her head. She kicked off her heels and placed her jewelry on the bedside table, feeling warm and cozy in the sheets and the soft fabric of her dress.

"Staring is rude, you know," he told her casually, unbuttoning his dress shirt.

"Unless you've earned the privilege," she raised her eyebrows.

"Earned or stole?"

"A little of both," she smiled.

He tossed the shirt at her. Then, smooth as ever, (he was always the smoothest operator out of all her ex boyfriends), he used an arm to vault himself over her and wrap their bodies together, his arms turning her towards him, lips finding hers, softly, gently, slowly.

While neither of them was drunk, and Rory was perfectly content to stay cocooned in the sheets, kissing him sweetly, fingers laced together, they did not stay slow and gentle for long. Jess could smolder, but sooner or later he burned, his skin hot, his lips furious. They sped up, demanding, wanting, pressing into each other, discarding unwanted articles of clothing. She felt herself melting into the heat of his body, forgetting her usual inhibitions, her exhaustion, and the small, outer-body part of her thought process that could not believe how permanently she was breaking her truce with Jess. _We're breaking this_ , she reminded herself, but quickly forgot even that as he expertly worked his way down her body.

For the first time they were truly _with_ each other, able to feel the heat that simmered between them, undistracted by the sounds from the gritty village bar or the sweet exhaustion that wrapped them in a haze the second time in New York. Here, above Luke's, she could trace the contours of his back and memorize the pressure points on his neck that caused his kisses to become more brutal, his breath shakier. He gathered her wrists and raised her arms above her head, pinning her slightly, the pressure of his body delicious on hers.

When she felt brave, the complicit courage and the sexual tension surging through her, she flipped him over and straddled him, enjoying the temporary surprise and appreciation in his eyes. She kissed him, sweetly, and worked her way down until he could no longer stand it and whirled her around, her back pressed into the mattress, his hand cupping her face and fiercely claiming her lips. The fire burned between them, and she quenched it with kisses until Jess' expertise and energy made her breathless. Was it a spark she had been looking for? Clinging to him, panting, she felt as if she had stumbled into the inferno.

Much later, in the deep night, with the lights shut off and his arms wrapped tightly around her as they both drifted off, Rory imagined Kerouac giving her a nod of approval. _We wandered in a frenzy and a dream_.

In the darkness, she drowsily laced her fingers through his. He pulled her closer, half-asleep, whispering into her ear.

They had broken everything, and Rory felt both dazed and fully cogent, as if her life was continuing along its natural course but with hazy, brief, delicious moments with a dark haired author that chose to no longer take his eyes off of her. Luke and Lorelai departed quickly for their honeymoon, so Jess and Rory had an extra day to be in Stars Hollow and try to neatly tie off the frayed ends of their decision. It came out sooner or later that Jess was actually already planning on moving to New York, that he and his "dumbass friends," or business partners, wanted to expand to two new locations in Greenwich Village and in Brooklyn. They had all made the decision that Jess should make the move months ago, but he had held off telling her.

Rory absorbed this, reaching for his hand. He shrugged. "I can look for bigger apartments if you'd like to live together."

She imagined her neat little apartment uptown, her space that always smelled like greasy take out and felt like a shrine to her professional career, her mobility, her success in New York. And she smiled, feeling as if perhaps, now that she was older, she was outgrowing the apartment. "Let me know when you find a place."

When Jess dropped her off at the train station he kissed her, once, twice, fiercely. "I'll let you know when I'm up there next. I'm sure I can find an excuse. The move should come together next month."

She kissed him back, "Deal."

"Here," he pulled a tattered paperback out of his back pocket, "This is for you. My old copy that I've had forever. Good luck reading through the scribbles."

It was an old edition of _On the Road_. Rory grinned. "Thanks."

He kissed her again, holding her close, and then released her and watched her board the train. Roy found a seat, and waved at him through the window. When the train pulled away she saw his dark figure standing there, and then turn to return towards the car. Her heart panged at the loss.

She flipped open the pages of the book, examining the incredible lines of his thin, narrow, slanted handwriting that filled every margin, occasionally crossing over the text itself. The handwriting was different, as if he had returned in different years to amend and add to his previous commentary.

On the inside cover, he wrote _Rory –_ and a page number.

She turned to the page, and saw a quote thickly underlined. _We agreed to love each other madly_.

Below that, in his familiar handwriting, he had written, quite simply, _We agreed to love each other madly_.

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 **A few notes for friends and readers -**

 **First, thank you for your feedback, for your reviews, and for your support. I appreciate all of it so, so very much.**

 **This was inspired by news of the reboot, but as I'm sure you can tell, it was conceptualized and mostly written before any spoilers of the reboot leaked. So, my seasons are out of order, characters show up more and less frequently than they are supposed to, among other canon inconsistencies.**

 **I am also aware that my timeline, when scrutinized closely (or not closely) does not quite match up to the canon either. Bear with me. Read it like the fiction it is.**

 **I am sorry for the long gap between the first three chapters and this final one. I hope the final chapter does the first three justice. It feels cathartic for me, as a fan, to give Rory and Jess the ending that I think they deserve. And, as a writer, I enjoyed the exercise of delving into Rory's mind and attempting to recapture a tablespoon of the wit in the original series.**

 **Thank you for reading! I hope this story gave you what you were looking for :)**

 **UPDATE 11/26, post-revival**

 **Well, now we know how it all ends - but there's some beauty in the lack of resolution.**

 **I hope that this fic can give some of you the Literati ending that you were hoping for!**


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